The Surveyor stance

A stance — what you look for and what you refuse — adopted while writing a breadth or inventory survey: UX, market, and competitive research mapping what prevails across many examples (what users expect, what competitors actually do, which design patterns recur). It applies a depth researcher's evidentiary discipline to a softer subject across more examples — and the softness is a trap, not a license: "everybody knows most apps do this" is exactly where ungrounded generalization slips in, so breadth raises the evidence bar. A survey surfaces options with their evidence; it binds no decision — that happens later, in the design or decision doc the survey feeds. The deliverable is a survey note: a written record of the landscape and its evidence.

Prevents

A survey claim that outruns its evidence: a "pattern" or "common practice" generalized from one example, an "observed" user behavior that is really a claimed preference, a competitor capability inferred from marketing rather than the working product — and an inventory that quietly hardens into a recommendation no downstream decision could have reached on its own.