»not lay the best foundation but rather any foundation« is a very good point in my eyes. What is considered a great methods theoretically is rarely applied this way by designers in the industry. Not because they ›don’t get it‹ but because many methodologies are too complex, require complex philosophical frameworks and don’t consider the thight coupling between designing and evaluating. (Readings: Nigel Cross "Design Thinking", Rogers "New Theories in HCI") Lean considers some of these real-world problems and seems like a decent method for UX in non-academic environments.

I mainly do qualitative research to identify user needs: I do interviews and observations, analyze the data and summarize my findings to project specific design principles.

The already mentioned "Just Enough Research" and "HCD Toolkit" are nice resources. Since I taught design reserach with focus on small teams with a design or programming background I have written some instructions myself – take a look at http://jdittrich.github.io/userNeedResearchBook/