I started treating my own experiences as research data. It changed how I design.
A UX designer’s honest take on autoethnography, and why it might be the most underrated method in your toolkit.
There’s a research method I’ve been quietly practicing for a while now. I didn’t have a name for it at first. I just kept noticing things. Noticing when an app annoyed me. Noticing when I second-guessed a design decision I’d made three weeks ago. Noticing the moment I felt lost in a flow I thought was “intuitive.”
I was journaling it, reflecting on it, picking it apart. And then I discovered the term: autoethnography.
And everything clicked.
Wait, what even is autoethnography?
Autoethnography is a qualitative research method where you use your own lived experience as data. You observe yourself, the way you’d observe a user. You document your reactions, your confusion, your workarounds, your emotions. And then you connect those personal insights to something bigger a pattern, a design problem, a cultural norm.
It sits at the intersection of autobiography and ethnography. “Auto” (self) + “ethno” (culture/people) + “graphy” (writing/study).
In academia, it’s been around for decades. In UX? It’s barely on the radar. Janelle Ward over at Dscout wrote one of the few pieces that touches on autoethnography in a UX research context and even she notes how rare it is for designers to use it as a regular practice, rather than a formal study method.
That gap is exactly why I’m writing this.
How it shows up in my actual work
Autoethnography isn’t one thing for me. It shows up in multiple ways, sometimes all in the same week.
When I hit friction using a product I use every day, I don’t just swipe away the frustration. I sit with it. I ask: why did I feel that? What did I expect to happen? What assumption did I bring that the product didn’t account for?
After a project wraps, I go back and reflect on my own design decisions. Not to judge them, but to understand them. Why did I push for that layout? What was I afraid of? What feedback did I internalize too quickly?
While I’m designing, I journal. Not formally, just notes. Observations about my own process. Moments where I felt confident vs. where I was guessing.
All of it is data.
“But aren’t you just thinking about yourself?”
Yes. And that’s the point.
Here’s the thing we don’t say enough in UX: designers bring a lived experience to every decision they make. Our biases, our assumptions, our personal histories with products and interfaces — they’re all in the room. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them invisible.
Autoethnography makes them visible.
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When I carefully document my own experience of a design problem, I’m not just learning about myself. I’m learning about the assumptions baked into the design. I’m finding the places where “intuitive” only means intuitive for some people. I’m catching the gaps that user interviews sometimes miss because users don’t always have words for what felt off.
What it’s done for my empathy, specifically
Before I started doing this intentionally, I had a habit a lot of designers have: I’d look at a user struggling with a flow and think, they just need to learn it. Not in a dismissive way I thought I was being pragmatic.
Autoethnography broke that habit.
Because when I started documenting my own confusion with products and interfaces I use regularly, I had to sit with something uncomfortable: I’m a UX designer, and I still get lost. I still click the wrong thing. I still feel dumb for a second.
And if that’s my experience trained, practiced, with context what is the experience of someone who doesn’t think about design at all?
That question hit differently after I started treating myself as a research participant. It made me less quick to blame the user. More curious about the gap between what I designed and what someone actually felt.
Empathy isn’t just a sticky note on a wall. It’s a practice. Autoethnography is part of mine.
How to start (it’s not complicated)
You don’t need a framework or a certification. You just need to start paying attention, and writing it down.
Notice your own friction. The next time you feel annoyed, confused, or pleasantly surprised using any product pause. Don’t just react. Observe. Write one sentence about what you felt and why.
Reflect after projects. Give yourself 20 minutes at the end of a design phase. What decisions did you make on instinct? What were you uncertain about? What would you push back on now?
Keep a running design journal. Doesn’t have to be long. Even bullet points. The goal is to create a record of your inner process not just your deliverables.
Over time, patterns emerge. And those patterns are research.
The part nobody talks about
Autoethnography is vulnerable.
You’re putting yourself under the microscope. You’re admitting confusion. You’re documenting the moments where you were guessing or wrong or just human. That’s not something design culture always makes space for.
But I’d argue that’s exactly why it works. The best user research is honest. And autoethnography forces you to be honest about the one person you can never fully escape: yourself.
The existing literature on autoethnography in UX tends to focus on formal research scenarios, using it to study specific user groups or cultural contexts. That’s valuable. Gulshamar Choudhary’s write-up on using autoethnography for urban mobility research is a great example of that more structured use. But I think there’s something even more accessible here: using it as a quiet, ongoing practice. Not a methodology you deploy. A mindset you carry.
Start noticing. Start writing. Start treating your own experience as data worth studying.
You might be surprised what you find.
