As per above, I doubt you would fit…

But; ethnography, mental modelling, contextual interviews are great as formal approaches. Back them up with surveys, market data and so on for quant data. I send my team down to listen to a few sales calls from customers every couple of months for half an hour.

Aside from that, simply spending time with people you’re aiming to communicate with & having an enormous capability for empathy definitely helps.

DJ

For your two remaining questions:
1) The usual UX answer: it depends! Depends of who you are, everybody will like different things. And it can also change during a career.

2) You can’t. Nobody can. Hopefully.

Although I agree that specialists are able to focus in a particular area more so than a jack-of-all trades, for people like myself, who either work on their own, or in a small team you sometimes have to wear many hats.

I try to make up for this by reading/learning as much as I can and putting these new found skills into practice in real-world projects; whether it may be programming, designing or coding.

if you consider the recent confused.com re-design and tv media assault you might be inclined to think usability. in their ads the tools and ability to fine-tune the options using specific UI controls are given prominence above any kind of graphic treatment.

so it depends (on many things including) from what direction in the experience lifecycle you are initially engaging with the user and what their motivation/needs are at that time.

in general i’d argue that both come second to content (yikes)

There are two ways you could go about this. One is if you blindly quote random sources to pad your coursework. The other is about understanding the conversation of HCI work that goes on in the industry. They’re two very different things that involve the same activity.

Yes, you don’t go off and sift through Google Scholar in UX projects, but you need to read a ton either way – and that research skill is invaluable. The course doesn’t grade you on how well your ability to find academic sources, but on your ability to understand how existing work is used to solve a problem, and how your contributions work as part of that solution.