The most important point in here is: UX methods like the ones above give concrete form to gut decisions and help you defend them against pointless changes and m

The most important point in here is: UX methods like the ones above give concrete form to gut decisions and help you defend them against pointless changes and management decisions. When you just go out and design a UI, people start wanting to add things or change colors (bike-shedding). And you, because you just made it up as you went along, can argue aesthetics, but also perhaps feel like maybe other people know as well as you do. But now you have personas, so when someone wants to add a feature, you can say: which of these people does that actually help, and which of them does it just confuse or get in the way? And you have card-sorting, so when someone wants to add extraneous nav elements, you can say: what concept does that fall within? Which personas will agree with that organization? And when someone wants to add lots of unnecessary questions to a form, you can say: how does this affect the rate at which people move through the storyboard and finish this key process? Do we want to jeopardize the completion rate for sign-ups just to get some more personal info? Now, once you understand this thinking and have the political power to defend your decisions, you might cut out some of these steps or only use them internal to your own decision-making. But as a young designer, these can be helpful both to fashion your design sense and to protect your decisions.