Zero budget. Timeline of yesterday. And a stakeholder asking if you can just ask ChatGPT instead.

Here's the thing — they're not entirely wrong.

In this episode, Jill walks through six free UX research methods, theme park edition, and shows how AI has quietly made most of them more powerful than ever. From mining hundreds of app reviews in ten minutes to guerrilla interviews in a theme park queue, these are real methods that work without a recruiting budget, a research lab, or a six-week timeline.

Covered in this episode:

— Review mining (and how AI does the affinity mapping for you)

— Guerrilla interviews with AI transcription

— The hallway test: why strangers at your company are your best testers

— Prototype testing when AI builds the prototype in two hours

— Observation journals — the one method AI genuinely can't touch

— Competitive analysis with AI-generated comparison matrices

Plus: Jill shares a ready-to-paste AI prompt at the end that matches any research question to the right method and spits out a 3-step execution plan. Instantly.

Next episode: Jill couldn't make it to the theme park, so she did the research from her couch instead. AI made it weirdly effective.

Design and Travel drops every Tuesday. Subscribe wherever you listen.