Episode highlights
00:01:14 – About Jen
00:02:27 – Jen’s journey to UX research
00:05:26 – Why user personas fail
00:09:26 – How many teams struggle to use personas
00:13:00 – Jen’s Scenario Alignment Canvas
00:18:18 – Running a Scenario Alignment Workshop
00:20:40 – Jen’s tips on running a UX workshop
00:25:16 – Final advice
About our guest
Jen Blatz is a Principal UX Researcher at BECU (Boeing Employee Credit Union), one of the largest credit unions in the United States. Jen’s path to UX started in journalism and graphic design, progressed to UX design, and finally landed in UX research and strategy. She has worked in a number of fields, including finance, mortgage, cloud storage, security, and pet health.
Jen loves being active in the UX community and is the co-founder of the UX Research and Strategy group, one of the largest UX groups in the world. Jen is a seasoned conference speaker who has spoken at several UX International conferences. She spends her free time interviewing UX pros and creating videos for her YouTube channel called BlatzChatz.
I am not a fan of personas… One problem is that personas are often like marketing personas. And we, as product designers and developers, UX folks, product folks, are not selling to customers. We are building products for existing customers. So we don't need to know that typical demographic information that personas have, which is how many kids they have, what their ages are, what race they are, and where they live. Those things don't weigh in a lot of the time in the way people actually use products. 
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Tina Ličková: Welcome to UXR Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world and topics they’re passionate about. I’m your host, Tina, a researcher and a product manager, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, the UX research platform for recruiting, conducting, analyzing, and sharing insights all in one place.
This is UXR Geeks, and you are listening to my conversation with Jen, who is a researcher, content creator, and the unapologetic extrovert shaking up the quiet researcher stereotype. Jen takes us from her design roots to her rebellion against personas and how the rebellion sparked a new framework for bringing the teams together to clear up what is their strategy.
The conversation is sharp, funny, and fearless, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
[00:01:11] Tina Ličková: Hi, Jen.
[00:01:12] Jennifer Blatz: Hi Tina.
[00:01:14] We always kick off with the question. On. Who are you and what are you, what are you up to these days? What are you working on?
[00:01:21] Jennifer Blatz: Yes, good question. So I am working as a user experience researcher at a credit union known as BECU, which is Boeing Employee Credit Union. And Boeing is a company that makes airplanes, but you don’t have to be a Boeing employee to be a member of this credit union.
And I do research with our members to understand how our products are doing, the typical all kinds of things of interviews, usability tests, whatever research needs to be done. I’m there to help do it, and I’m also working on a new newsletter I have called Blats Chats. That’s chats with a Z, which ladders up to my YouTube channel of the same name.
So, creating content like crazy. That’s what I’m doing.
[00:02:16] Tina Ličková: Okay, Jen, I had a look at your YouTube channel. And it’s a common misbelief that UX researchers are introverted and quiet and, and you are out there, and I really like your energy. How did you become a UX researcher?
[00:02:30] Jennifer Blatz: I am an extrovert. And I actually started in journalism design, so started designing in newspapers.
That was my first job, designing a daily newspaper and morphing into magazines, and then later marketing for a law firm. And when I was at that law firm several years ago, I saw the industry where it was going, print design was dying, and everybody was becoming a web designer and developer. And I’m like, oh, code.
No, that’s just not me. I just could not fall in love with coding websites. So, uh, I learned about this field, I guess you could say called User experience design. I was like, oh, hey, I like this. They used all the tools that I was already using, Photoshop and Illustrator, and all the Adobe tools. This was way before sketch, way before Figma.
And I was like, yes, this is what I wanna do. And I started studying all about UX design and learning about the differences between graphic design and art direction and UX design. ’cause there are differences. And then networking a lot and really meeting people and understanding how are you getting into UX and what does the discipline look like and what do you do there?
My first UX job was a visual designer job, which makes sense. I was a graphic designer and I had a lot of visual design skills, and one of my first jobs was actually at an animal hospital, and it was the coolest job because my research was awesome to go into animal hospitals and shadow doctors to see how they used our software.
So what a fun way to learn about how to approach user research and use that research and the information that you’re observing and learning in-house, and then taking that back and designing solutions for that. And I fell more in love with the research side of things than coming up with a solution and implementing the design.
So I slowly morphed over into. A designer slash researcher role. And then the last couple of companies I’ve been at, they split the two. You’re either a designer or a researcher and I chose research and have not ever looked back.
[00:05:10] Tina Ličková: I get it. I wanna start with the controversy here that you are not really a persona, a big persona, fan. Can you maybe enlighten me there? Like why? I wouldn’t say you hate it, but you are not in such a favor.
[00:05:24] Jennifer Blatz: Sure. There’s no secret out there. I am not a fan of personas. Tina, you are so right. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. And I think one of them is they’re not used, honestly, I’ve asked a lot of people, are you using personas at your company?
Most say. No, they’re really not using them in their design decisions, in their product discussions, in their feature builds. One problem is that personas are often like marketing personas, and we as product designers and developers or whatever you wanna call us, UX folks, product folks, we are not selling to customers.
We are building products for existing customers, generally speaking, so we don’t need to know that typical demographic information that personas have, which is how many kids do they have, what are their ages, what race they are, where they live. Those things don’t weigh in A lot of the times in the way people actually use products.
I have seen people in their twenties and people in their sixties. Use the products in the same way, different ages, but similar behaviors. And that’s the problem I have when we segment people by ages and race and what kind of candy they eat. Those are not relevant generally to how a person uses a product or a feature.
And so that’s a huge problem I have is that it splits people into weird ways that don’t matter how their user experience is. The other problem I have is. They’re not used a lot of the time because of different reasons, like I mentioned, the marketing segmentation and that sort of thing. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to properly do research and observations and interviews, to build personas, to really get the data to make them robust and rich.
And that takes a lot of time. So it’s a lot of time wasted to build personas that. Just get printed out and put on a wall or put in a drawer, or just left on a computer somewhere. They’re just not worth the effort for how much they’re utilized.
[00:07:45] Tina Ličková: Before we continue, I have a quick message. As Jen mentions, creating personas is time consuming. So naturally many have started using AI for that purpose, but how careful should we be when using AI and research? UXtweak recently published a great report summarizing how UX professionals feel about AI applications in our field. So if you’re interested in that, the report link is in the description.
Now let’s get back to Jen.
It’s interesting because I am always split and we had few episodes and personas or where we were mentioning it, and. As you’re saying, the best personas that I ever built in an organization where a lot of work, a lot of work with data analysts, segmentations, learnings, and then bringing it to the personas.
And I know it was very lived by the organization because the team that we were, we’re living by it and we’re always bringing it into some workshops and ideations and always reminding people. The moment the team left. I know I was asking some colleagues who stayed changed roles in their organization. It was like, what about the personas?
They were really good, and I think it was the first time this huge bank really got an idea. They have actually living customers, so it was good for a reason, but it was only live when there were ambassadors. And now I’m going again to switch to you that it actually brought you somewhere where it inspired you for a different type of action.
And how to work with teams and how to work with your stakeholders. Could you go there and tell us how it did inspire you?
[00:09:26] Jennifer Blatz: I can see what you are talking about, Tina, when you first build them. They’re exciting. We feel like we’re connected with the customer and we understand them well. And we empathize with them, and I think that they can be used at first as time goes on, they’re referenced less or they’ll say they’re not relevant anymore or that things have changed.
So I don’t know that we should bring Sally out into these discussions because she’s now a mother of two versus a single. Woman, and that’s the problem is they could lose their luster over time. But I do appreciate that it’s a focal point for discussion and a focal point for decisions to point to, to get people away from their own personal opinions and back to being customer centric so they can be valuable in that sense, I just haven’t had a lot of success.
Of teams using them for that reason. And a lot of the times, the reason that they’re not referenced is because they’re too high level or they’re too generic, or I am building this one little thing and I don’t know enough about this persona to apply it to this specific scenario. And so that’s where they fall apart.
For designers I’ve seen, they’re like, oh, I want financial health. What does that even mean? And I’m building a calendar, so what does I want? Financial health, a very generic concept mean. From a persona when I’m building a little thing over here that I am struggling to make that connection you make here a very important distinction.
[00:11:08] Tina Ličková: That it’s great for discussion and empath, but they die off, but they are not really actionable and that’s why they die off. Yeah.
[00:11:18] Jennifer Blatz: Think that’s part of it. From the time that we’ve had personas and tried to bring ’em into discussions, they get dismissed for a lot of different reasons. And that varies depending on the discussion, but that’s one of ’em, Tina, especially from designers, they’re like, I don’t know.
I don’t see how this persona ties to what I’m working on.
[00:11:37] Tina Ličková: We will be right back after a short break with a commercial message from our sponsors. Hello, UXR Geeks. This is Tina speaking. You might already know that this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, a research tool. And research tools are great until you need five of them to run a proper study.
That’s why I actually use UXtweak. It handles everything from concept testing to usability checks, both moderated and unmoderated. It also takes care of the analyzers with no message spreadsheets, no frustrating dashboards or endless reports. Just clear insights, ready to share. So if you’re curious, go to uxtweak.com website and start for free.
No credit card and no strings attached.
And going back to you, I am interested in how. You reacted to it because I know you created your own framework to work with teams and I’m always such a big ave of people like coming up with their own frameworks and methodologies on one side and on the other side it’s like, it’s a small evil thing in me telling me like, oh, another framework, why?
[00:12:58] Jennifer Blatz: So that’s me about it and I promise I stay open. I’m with you, not another goddamn framework. I know you’re not wrong. So here’s the thing. Here’s how it came to be. I created this thing called the SAC, which is short for Scenario Alignment canvas. And I’ll explain what that is and I, but let me tell you first where it came from.
So where I work, we were all tasked to write a playbook for a different. UX methodology or approach. Somebody had journey maps, someone had service design blueprints. They gave me personas because I have the most experience building personas, and I’m like, God, no, I hate personas. And they’re like, great. You are gonna do it anyways.
So it is what I gotta do. So I got to thinking about what I didn’t care for when it comes to personas, how long they take to build, how much all that effort is wasted in the end, and how generic or high level they are. And I was like, I gotta do something. I gotta come up with something else. But I still want the components of what a user experience persona has.
Not the demographics, not the pink car and the 2.1 dogs. None of that crap what a UX persona really should have. And so I came up with this workshop framework and it’s a little bit multipurpose. First thing is it’s like building out a proto persona and or assumptive persona, which is the team comes together.
They think they discuss a person doing a thing or a product, usually how they would use our product and they fill in a whiteboard together and fill in their assumptions around that. Okay, that’s cool. It’s also, if you’re joining a project or a team, it’s a great way to get a brain dump from anybody. A SME or anybody who’s on the project are already So scenario on Canvas is a good way to be like, oh, hi, I’m new.
Can we discuss? The user of this feature, but it also surfaces assumptions and research opportunities. Now, I don’t know about you, Tina, but I have gone in and I’m like, oh, hey, what do we need to research? What questions do you have? And I get nothing. So this is a way, covert way to get people to put their assumptions down and I can be like, Hey, how do we know that’s true?
What data do we have to support that? And when they say we don’t have any, and I think it’s an assumption that signals to me we could do more research on that and learn more about it. So that’s how it came to be was I was revolting against having to write a persona, playbook, came up with this other thing.
The key here is it’s a scenario. It’s not. Financial health, something generic. It is a person doing a thing stealing from Iny Young’s concept of a scenario or jobs to be done. I know you’ve probably heard of that too. Yeah. So let’s say again, I’ll steal from Iny Young, ’cause I love her example. Somebody is going through an airport like they’re taking a flight now.
A person who, a business traveler. Who travels through this airport every week to travel for business is gonna have a different set of circumstances and needs and goals and pain points than a person, let’s say a mother of three little kids who’s going to see grandma somewhere and they never go through the airport, and it’s just one parent and three little kids.
They’re gonna have different things going on. That business traveler is gonna go. Exactly to the restaurant. He knows exactly what to order and he’s using apps or who knows what he’s doing versus this woman who’s like, I never go to the airport. I have three littles and tow. Those experiences have different scenarios and have different needs.
Again, pain points. So when you narrow it down to the business traveler who flies through the airport, in and out, constantly. How you design a solution for, let’s say ordering food is gonna be different for that person who knows every into the airport versus someone who barely goes to the airport, has a lot of little kids with them trying to keep the chaos in order.
That’s a different design solution. There’s a different environment going on there. And so what, breaking those apart into scenarios and getting really specific on who you’re designing for. Is the level of detail that personas don’t have ’cause they’re too high and that you could do a workshop on in an hour or two and really come up with understanding that user a bit more.
[00:18:03] Tina Ličková: I’m just wondering because there are workshops where I wanna surprise people. And have them like just co coming with what they, what I have in their heads and there are workshops where I want them to prepare. What type of a workshop is a tech workshop for you?
[00:18:18] Jennifer Blatz: Good question. I would say this is a non prepare.
Share what you know. It makes it more approachable for everybody. I might call you later and say, what documents do you have? You can go find it later to support your assumptions, but this is really. Yeah, just similar to a proto persona where you’re coming in, we’re gonna talk about this person’s goals.
What are their goals? Next, we’re gonna talk about their needs and their tasks. What are they doing while they’re trying to meet this goal of getting to their flight? And finally, what are their pain points and what are their struggles as they’re going through this? And these are all components that you would see in a user experience persona.
I’m not talking demographics. What are their needs and their motivations and their goals? Those kind of things are the things that you typically see in a UX persona. But let’s say the mother’s pain point is she doesn’t know how to print out a ticket where the person who comes to the airport all the time probably hasn’t ticket on his phone.
Somebody who’s not familiar with the process as much will probably have different pain points and different needs. So if a person isn’t sure about the process of getting through the airport and where to eat and those sort of things, they might need more guidance. So you would think about solutions to give them more guidance.
So thinking about those different aspects are really where the design opportunities come from.
[00:19:51] Tina Ličková: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I am also interested in the facilitating. Kind of approach that you have in these workshops because okay, you might be working for American clients or more American employers, but America is pretty multicultural and I am just comparing, for example, if I am working with.
Slavics or Eastern Europeans, it’s way less structured than when I’m working with Germans and it’s not even stereotyping. It’s really coming from my practice. When there is a multicultural group, it’s becoming even wilder and brain dumps invite for workshops being wild, which could be good, which could be less good.
So how do you as a facilitator, navigate through these workshops?
[00:20:39] Jennifer Blatz: Hm. Very good question because that’s key. Really, Tina, anybody in theory could run a workshop, but facilitation is an important skill in workshops that I think a lot of people overlook. And you gotta make sure that you’re keeping the hippos and the bosses at check and everybody has an opportunity to speak or not, those kind of things.
So this kind of workshop, this is not a free for all. Everybody gets to come in and say what they want. I have a phrase that I say. When I come into a workshop, it’s, wait, WAIT, why am I talking? Mm-hmm. I also have a phrase, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Elmo, that Sesame Street character, you may have heard this, where if I say Elmo or if I put a picture of Elmo in the chat or whatever that means enough, let’s move on.
So some of those facilitation tactics are really helpful. But one thing that I do to run this workshop is when we are brain dumping. It is in silence for eight minutes or however long it takes for people to fill in the canvas. No one’s talking. We’re just silently filling this in. And then I am putting some kind of indicator on the stickies that I think could be research opportunities.
It’s things I think are assumptions or inaccurate or things that I think this team needs to learn more about. It could help us mitigate risk. And I say, Hey, I see this thing here where you assume this man is using an Android to get through the airport. What data do you have that shows that is true? But I call out the discussion points As a researcher.
This is for me to gather data, to understand the user, to understand where the team is and what they know, and also determine the gaps in knowledge that I could research further. I’m here to ultimately. Build out a research plan and understand what we need to know more about this scenario, about this user to build the product in the right way.
[00:22:46] Tina Ličková: I like that you are not trigger coding it because it’s also important to say the workshops that we do are. I would even say most of the time for us to understand this issue, especially if you’re new or if you’re a freelancer contractor, you wanna understand it. You wanna deliver a good results of a research that you are supposed to run, so why not get a good briefing to summarize it maybe for folks out there, what would you say are the best, and I will use your own term scenarios to use SEC in their environment.
[00:23:20] Jennifer Blatz: That’s a good question. It depends. That’s where you work with your product donor to understand. ’cause it should usually will ladder up to a feature, right? That either they’re thinking of building or improving. If I’m not working on, let’s say, an app for an airport food ordering system, I’m not gonna do a scenario about how does a person wanna.
Sign up for a credit card, right? It needs to align with the business goals and the features and the things that they’re thinking about building it. You might need to do two, three, or four scenario alignment canvas workshops. Now, I would say you could do one or two in person or you know, live. And then maybe the other scenario is once the team gets a feel for how to do it.
Maybe it’s async, right? And have them fill in around this other scenario. So the first scenario is the business person traveling weekly. The second scenario is the mom with little kids in tow getting through the airport. The third is an old person who has a mobility issue. What is that experience like for them?
And what are their goals and what are their needs and their pain points? And they’re different. Again, depending on the feature and what you’re trying to build is how finite that scenario needs to be. It’s not just a person needs to go through an airport and therefore they need to order food. There are different circumstances, so thinking about those different design problems, what problem you’re trying to solve.
Can help you split what those scenarios might look like.
[00:25:00] Tina Ličková: And my last question, it doesn’t have to be EC related or persona related, but as a bold and experienced woman, I would like to ask you if there is one piece of advice that you would give researchers nowadays, what would it be?
[00:25:16] Jennifer Blatz: I would say don’t be afraid to question assumptions.
Don’t just assume. That your product owner or your product manager is right or knows the best solution and go with what they say. If your gut’s telling you, I’m not sure it is okay to go and research on your own, you don’t need permission. If something feels weird to you and you’re like, I’m not sure that this is accurate or this is true, go figure out on your own.
If it is or isn’t, and get the data to back it up and don’t make it about like I’m trying to prove you wrong. It’s about the data shows and any good product owner will be accepting to what the data shows. Now I’ve been there where a product, Don did not want to hear what the data showed and she told me.
Don’t bring your bad news here, Jen. I was like, okay, if you’re not gonna listen to me, I will go to the VP above you and tell them the truth. This feature was gonna get built and the users, not only did they not want it, they were angry it was going to exist. Mm-hmm. So my piece of advice is trust your gut and don’t take things at face value.
It’s okay to do research on your own to. Determine if that is the right direction or the truth or whatever that might be. You don’t need to seek permission, and if you’re in a place that is all about you have to seek permission might not be the place for you to be.
[00:26:53] Tina Ličková: I think we all have to be ambitious about equality of research in the inside you’re getting. And if there is a very low ambition of just to verify that you are right as a product manager and I’m talking as a product manager, then a researcher has to push for bigger ambitions. Definitely. Jen, thank you for your time. Thank you for your wisdom. I, it was very pleasure with me.
[00:27:18] Jennifer Blatz: Thank you so much for having me, Tina. This was so much fun.
[00:27:26] Tina Ličková: Thank you for listening to UXR Geeks. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow our podcast and share it with your friends and colleagues. Your support is really what keeps us going.
If you have any tips on fantastic speakers from across the globe, feedback, or any questions, we would love to hear from you, so reach out to geekspodcast@uxtweak.com.
Special thanks goes to my colleagues, to our podcast producer, Ekaterina Novikova, our social media specialist, Daria Krasovskaya, and our audio specialist, Melissa Danisova.
And to all of you, thank you for tuning in.
💡 This podcast was brought to you by UXtweak, an all-in-one UX research tool.
