I spent most of my young designer/developer career primarily interested in all things UI/UX. Have done the early NielsenNorman UI/UX stuff, read countless book

I spent most of my young designer/developer career primarily interested in all things UI/UX. Have done the early NielsenNorman UI/UX stuff, read countless books/blogs/etc & even gotten a couple "certifications" ( worst personal waste of my time). There are three elements that have contributed the most to my understanding of UX: 1) Gut instinct on what will work the best in a given scenario based on personal creativity (have designed 2-3xx number of concepts) as well as the collective of ideas/concepts/apps/widgets/scripts/designs floating around communities that just "work well" or solve "pain in the_ issues". 2) Iterative trial, testing based on functional page-level KPIs for a given scenario such as time-to-action, conversion, drop-off, hit errors, I've even tested for which pixel hit areas of a graphic button get the best responses. Learned lessons contributing to 1) 3) Any concepts/assessments rooted from hard psychological research in the fields of HCI/Industrial Psych from which I can use to contribute to practices in 1) and 2). These points of knowledge allow me to substantiate claims and advocate for improvement (particularly if I'm working on sensitive or mission-critical applications--finance, defense, health).