Workshops as Research: Avoiding the Trap of UX Theatre

User experience design is widely recognized as a critical success factor in product development, yet too many projects still fall victim to UX Theatre. When I first wrote about UX Theatre back in 2018, I defined it as the use of UX methods without actually involving users or involving users just for show. These projects look like they’re doing user-centered design, but in reality, they’re not. And often, this performance traces directly back to the misuse of workshops, especially when internal opinions take priority over objective data and genuine user interaction.

At their core, workshops are meant to elicit, analyze, and synthesize information. They’re structured conversations for making sense of data but they are not research in and of themselves. Despite that, I’ve seen projects where workshops are used as the only form of user research. That kind of shortcut creates an artificial environment where:

• internal staff role-play as end clients,

• questions surface opinions that go unverified, and

• participants fill walls with sticky notes and rush into design based on ideas dreamt up in a room, completely skipping external validation.

Teams can spend weeks on internal stakeholder workshops, kidding themselves that this activity replaces critical UX practices like job shadowing, usability testing, or real user research.

When that happens, the central question shifts from, “What did we see and hear?” to “What do we think?” or worse, “What do we think we know?” Requirements generated in these rooms aren’t grounded in reality. They’re make-believe.

This flaw often stems from organizational dynamics. Executives may underfund UX, dismiss research results, or assume “users don’t know what they want” or “we already know our users.” In those cultures, internal workshops become the quick, cheap, go-to option. But they’re less effective.

The problem is, when design work built on opinion inevitably fails to deliver value, leaders become even harder to convince next time around. It perpetuates a destructive cycle: UX is treated as Theatre, and real UX never gets a chance to happen.

The way forward is clear. Designers have to set realistic workshop goals and outcomes and just as importantly, advocate for data-driven decision-making by involving users throughout the entire design lifecycle. Without that, workshops risk becoming props on a stage instead of tools for meaningful design.