A UX practitioner demonstrates 8 core competencies. By assessing each team member's 'signature' in these eight areas, managers can build a fully rounded user experience team. This approach also helps identify the roles for which each team member is most suited alongside areas for individual development.
Craft, Leadership
The 8 competencies of user experience: a tool for assessing and developing UX Practitioners
Creating Empathy Maps is useful for synthesizing research data in order to better understand the users. Empathy Maps are great for creating Personas, identifying users with different mindsets.
Workshops
Empathy Maps — UX Knowledge Base Sketches
Knowledge
Domain Expert Interview — UX Knowledge Base Sketches
Domain Experts / Subject Matter Experts / Industry Experts have invaluable knowledge that you can (and should) apply during your UX process. Domain expert involvement is not an alternative to UX research, and a domain expert is certainly neither a “user expert” nor a designer.
Interviews
Domain Expert Interview — UX Knowledge Base Sketches
The main goal of Card Sorting is to improve a website’s or an application’s Information Architecture, to help designing how the information is organized and labelled.