The overarching goal of this research is to develop a user-centric, enhanced repository of design methods, to support design practice and pedagogy. The specific objective is to report the empirical reviews of the web-based repositories of design methods by design students, based on using the repositories, to answer the following questions: (a) what are the pros and cons of the repositories? and (b) what features of these repositories can be used in the enhanced repository? This study involves an experiment conducted with 15 design students, who explored 9 functioning repositories by carrying out the following 4 tasks (for each repository): find a method for a given task; read and understand the method description; find the same method through a different path; and explore the entire repository. The experiment is followed by: (a) interviews to identify the pain- and pleasure points of the repositories, as experienced by the students while carrying out the tasks, and (b) a survey to gauge the user effectiveness, efficiency, user learnability, user satisfaction, user’s views on the hedonic parameters associated with the repository and the overall experience of using the repository. The identified pros and cons are categorized into 4 themes and 11 features are derived to be used in the enhanced repository. The uniqueness of this work is in the empirical reviews conducted by users in comparison to previous work which is theoretical in nature and conducted by researchers.