Coping with Uncertainty in UX Design Practice: Practitioner Strategies and Judgment

TL;DR

The paper investigates how UX designers experience and navigate uncertainty in daily practice, addressing a gap in understanding the situated nature of uncertainty in UX work. It employs a qualitative, practice-focused design—four weeks of diary data plus follow-up interviews with ten designers—grounded in an interpretivist framework and analyzed via a hybrid thematic approach. The study identifies five sources of uncertainty (People & Power, Collaboration & Coordination, Process & Planning, Project Reframing, Feasibility & Constraints) and four strategy families (Framing/Judgment/Improvisation, Negotiating Alignment/Building Trust, Surfacing Constraints/Informing Action, Managing Expectations/Trade-offs), revealing additional forms of judgment such as temporal and sacrificial judgment. The findings position uncertainty as a structuring condition of UX design and argue for cultivating practical judgment in education and professional development to better prepare designers for complex, real-world contexts.

Abstract

The complexity of UX design practice extends beyond ill-structured design problems to include uncertainties shaped by shifting stakeholder priorities, team dynamics, limited resources, and implementation constraints. While prior research in related fields has addressed uncertainty in design more broadly, the specific character of uncertainty in UX practice remains underexplored. This study examines how UX practitioners experience and respond to uncertainty in real-world projects, drawing on a multi-week diary study and follow-up interviews with ten designers. We identify a range of practitioner strategies-including adaptive framing, negotiation, and judgment-that allow designers to move forward amid ambiguity. Our findings highlight the central role of design judgment in navigating uncertainty, including emergent forms such as temporal and sacrificial judgment, and extend prior understandings by showing how UX practitioners engage uncertainty as a persistent, situated feature of practice.