The practitioners who make the best decisions are not always the most experienced or the most talented. They are the ones who ask the right questions at the right moment, before anyone else has thought to ask them. Those questions are not random, they come from instincts that have been built up over time, through exposure to real problems, difficult briefs, and teams that think differently.
Those same instincts show up in interviews. They show up when you are in a room with a new client. They show up when a brief lands on your desk that nobody else knows how to handle. The more of them you have, the more valuable you become - to your team, to the people you work for, and to your own career.
These are not skills you have learned. They are first thoughts - the way your brain responds before you have had time to think more carefully.
Instincts grow through exposure. The more you work alongside people who think differently and face problems outside your comfort zone or discipline, the faster that happens.
Notice which instincts feel familiar and which feel foreign. The familiar ones show where you are strongest. The unfamiliar ones show where the most growth is possible.
If you lean toward the Business lens, your first instinct is usually to ask why this work exists, who it has to work for, and what might stop it from working.
The instinct is to understand why this work matters before engaging with any of the detail. A brief without context feels incomplete. You want to know what this is meant to change, and for whom, before you start.
The risk: You can spend time questioning the goal when the team just needs to get moving. Not every brief comes with the full picture.
Example: You are asked to improve sign-up. Before you start, you want to know whether the problem is people dropping off, or the wrong people signing up in the first place.
You do not need to know what everyone thinks. The instinct is to identify who has the most influence over a decision and understand what they care about most before you walk into a room.
The risk: Focusing too much on what stakeholders want can pull you away from what users actually need.
Example: Before a presentation, you think about who in the room has the final say and what they will want to hear, then you lead with that.
Any solution has to work for both sides. The instinct is to ask what the user gets and what the business gets. If only one side is being served, something is missing.
The risk: Leave one side out and the balance breaks. A solution that only serves the business will be felt by users. One that only serves users will not get built.
Example: The team wants to add a referral scheme. The instinct is to ask what the user actually gets out of recommending a friend — and whether that feels worth it.
Good design can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the design. The instinct is to think about what needs to be true inside the organisation for a solution to actually work when it goes live.
The risk: Can pull focus toward internal problems that the user never sees and the brief never asked you to solve.
Example: A new booking flow tests well but never launches. Nobody had checked whether the back-end system could support it.
If you lean toward the Science lens, your first instinct is usually to question what you are being told, look for the real reason behind what you observe, and trust process to get to better answers.
Before forming a view or agreeing to a direction, the instinct is to ask what we actually know. Moving forward on assumption alone feels like a risk, not a starting point.
The risk: Can slow things down when a decision is needed and waiting for more information is not an option.
Example: A stakeholder says users want a dark mode because someone mentioned it once. The instinct is to ask where that came from before it becomes a feature.
What people say and what people do are often different things. The instinct is to keep asking why until the real reason comes up, not just the first one.
The risk: Can lead to over-researching when a simpler answer would have done the job just as well.
Example: Users say they want more search filters. The instinct is to ask what they are actually struggling to find, because more filters might not be the fix.
Before starting from scratch, the instinct is to ask whether research into how people think and behave has already answered this. That knowledge exists and is often ignored. But what works for one product or one set of users may not work for yours, existing knowledge is a starting point, not an answer.
The risk: It is easy to reach for a recognised pattern and stop there. Not every problem fits a known solution.
Example: A long form has a high drop-off rate. Before running new research, the instinct is to recognise this as a known problem, people resist giving information they do not see the value in.
Good process matters. But not every project needs the full version. Built from experience, the instinct is to know when rigour is essential and when a lighter approach gets you to the same place without cutting quality.
The risk: Less experienced practitioners may cut corners too early. More experienced ones may over-process out of habit. Neither serves the project.
Example: Five user conversations give you everything you need to move forward. The instinct is to recognise that and stop there, rather than designing a full study that takes three weeks and tells you the same thing.
When you see a design or hear a proposal, the instinct is to test it rather than agree with it. Finding a weakness early is more useful than making someone feel good about what they have made.
The risk: People stop sharing work early if every response feels like a challenge. The instinct can close down the conversation it is meant to improve.
Example: A teammate shares a prototype they are proud of. The first question that comes to mind is: what have we not tested yet? That question surfaces a flow nobody had checked on a slow connection. It gets fixed before launch.
If you lean toward the Creativity lens, your first instinct is usually to picture the experience from the inside, keep working until things feel right, and trust your own judgment when something is off.
The first answer, the logical one, the one everyone agrees on, is worth considering. But the instinct is not to stop there. There may be a better answer further along, and you will not find it unless you look. Sometimes you come back to the original. Now you know it was right.
The risk: You can pass over a perfectly good solution looking for something more interesting. Sometimes the obvious answer was the right one.
Example: A client wants fewer steps in a checkout. The obvious fix is to cut a step. The instinct is to first ask whether the whole checkout could work differently - not just be made shorter.
Before anything is designed, the instinct is to picture what this moment actually feels like for the person on the receiving end. This is not research, it is instinctive and often involuntary. Research comes later to check whether that instinct was right.
The risk: Your version of the experience is not the user's real one. Instinct without evidence is still assumption.
Example: Before sketching anything, you spend a moment thinking about what it feels like to hit an error message at the end of a long form, tired, on your phone, having just lost everything you typed.
If something still feels hard to understand or hard to use, the work is not done. The instinct is to keep going until the answer feels obvious.
The risk: Can push for a simpler solution before the problem is fully understood, or strip out detail that actually mattered.
Example: A six-step process gets redesigned into one clear screen. It took four rounds to get there, but now it is obvious what happens next.
Something can feel wrong before you can explain why. The instinct is to notice that feeling, back it, and hold that position while the reasoning catches up, even under pressure.
The risk: Without being able to explain your thinking, instinct reads as arrogance. It can close down a conversation rather than move it forward.
Example: A screen comes back and something is off. You cannot say what yet. You flag it anyway. A day later you find it, and fixing it changes how the whole page reads.
The more of these instincts you develop, the better you become at your job, and the more visible that becomes to the people around you.
Instincts show up in how you talk about your work. The practitioner who instinctively asks the right questions, frames problems clearly, and knows where they lead - that is the person who is remembered after the interview is over.
When a situation is unclear and the stakes are high, teams look for the person who knows how to think through it. Strong instincts across all three lenses make you that person.
People with strong instincts are consistent and readable. Their colleagues know how they think, what they will prioritise, and where they will push back. That kind of clarity builds trust quickly.
The right question at the right moment changes the outcome of a project. Instinctive practitioners do not wait to be told what the real problem is. They are already asking before the brief has been written.
Surface problems are easy to see. The instinct to look underneath them, at the reason, the blocker, the unspoken assumption - is what separates good work from work that actually changes something.
When your instincts are developed, you are not starting from zero every time. You have a frame. You know what questions to ask first. That makes you faster without making you careless.
The UX Lens Check is free. It puts you through six realistic project scenarios and maps your instinctive choices to a lens profile. Most people find the result more accurate than they expected.