How To Run UX Research Without Access To Users

UX research without users isn’t research. We can shape design ideas with bias, assumptions, guesstimates, and even synthetic users, but it’s anything but UX research. Yet some of us might find ourselves in situations where we literally don’t have access to users — because of legal constraints, high costs, or perhaps users just don’t exist yet. What do we do then?
Luckily, there are some workarounds that help us better understand pain points and issues that users mig