UX Research & Service Design For Enterprise

Through UX research, we have the chance to improve bad enterprise software. I will talk about how to take research to new heights, by applying mixed methods and by modifying the traditional Service Design Blueprint, to suit alternative research needs and how this can make any project infinitely better.
Many of us have worked on some pretty poorly designed enterprise software. As UX professionals, we must fight for those who suffer through that experience for hours on end at work. I am going to share a case study where I applied user research methods and Service Design principles to improve the report-making process. My quest for a better customer report goes through a variety of research methods to uncover gaps and opportunities. Going from low-fidelity analysis to improvement recommendations, I show people how they can think outside of the box of a traditional Service Design Blueprint to make any project profoundly better. Using mixed methods in creative ways can be applied to projects outside of the consumer-facing UX world.

Don’t get Pricked. Use the Rose, Thorn, Bud Facilitation Method to Take Insights to a Higher Level

We have ways to run workshops, brainstorm ideas, and gain insights. Rose, Bud, Thorn is an approach that people can surface problems and opportunities in any industry. The “secret sauce” is in the drill-down questions that the researcher will use to prompt participants into deeper thinking.
“Rose, Bud, Thorn” is a Design Thinking research method that brings teams together to brainstorm positive aspects, negative aspects and opportunities for a process, system or product. This method is a great starter for those who are interested in facilitating workshops or surfacing research insights. More importantly, this is a very creative method to dive deeper on a process or topic and really surface deep insights and opportunities.

Your Manager Is Not Your Advocate. Plan Accordingly.

The modern manager is often expected to be part coach, therapist, sponsor, mentor, strategist, conflict mediator, advocate and emotional support system. That bundle of expectations is unrealistic. This is especially true in organizations where managers are overloaded or balancing the employee’s needs against the company’s priorities. When senior professionals treat their manager as the center of career support, they create a dangerous single point of failure.
This talk separates the roles people commonly collapse into “my manager,” and how other roles are critical to bring into your life for career success. One person may occasionally perform several roles, but employees should not assume they will or can do all of them.
Attendees will learn how to build a support “board of directors” instead of hoping for a unicorn manager. This talk will map the relationships needed for craft growth, organizational navigation, advocacy, emotional support, market awareness and accountability. The session also provides frameworks for making clearer requests, asking a sponsor for visible advocacy or asking a mentor for pattern recognition.
Once professionals stop demanding every form of support from one relationship, they can improve the relationship they have and intentionally build the network they need.

Talk Outline
• The impossible manager job description and identifying traits
• The risks of a single-source support system
• Importance of building a relationship board of directors for growth, advocacy and resilience
• Frameworks for getting the right help from the right person

Four Key Takeaways
• A realistic definition and understanding of the manager’s responsibilities and constraints.
• Frameworks for separating six kinds of career and personal support.
• A relationship map that reduces dependence on one manager.
• Practical language for making clearer, more appropriate requests.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz is a Principal Experience Researcher with decades of experience as an IC, individual contributor. She has been let down by managers before and has learned valuable lessons that any professional can gain from Jen’s experience. Though never holding a formal “manager” tittle, Jen has been in a position of leadership for years. She discusses how to find people who can “lead from where they are” without the formal title or direct reports.

The Problem Is NOT That AI Is Human-Like. It Is That Humans Are AI-Like.

Debate often focuses on whether AI is becoming too human: conversational, persuasive, influential and emotionally convincing. A more uncomfortable concern is how much human decision-making already resembles the systems we criticize. People classify quickly, rely on patterns from incomplete experience, inherit bias from past examples, produce confident explanations after the fact and repeat familiar answers when uncertainty is high. AI did not invent these weaknesses. AI industrializes and digitizes them.
This talk uses the comparison to sharpen, not flatten, the differences between people and machines. Humans have lived experience, moral responsibility, relationships and the capacity to reflect and change. AI systems operate through learned statistical patterns without human understanding or accountability. Yet both can create an illusion of reasoned certainty. When humans trust AI, they may be recognizing a familiar decision style rather than a reliable one.
Attendees will examine AI-to-human mirrored behaviors: pattern matching, shortcuts, bias and weak explanations. For each, the session shows the amplification effect that occurs when automated systems operate at scale, speed and consistency while appearing neutral and speedy. The practical response is not to demand impossible purity from either humans or AI. It is to design checks that account for both: diverse evidence, explicit uncertainty, counter examples, decision logs, source reveal, contestability and meaningful review. Let’s not forget the elephant in the room: AI taking human jobs. The talk also reframes human-in-the-loop design and product. A human is not automatically a safeguard if that person shares the same assumptions, lacks time or cannot challenge the system. Better outcomes require complementary oversight, not ceremonial approval.

Talk Outline
• The wrong fear: AI becoming human
• Four mirrors: patterns, shortcuts, bias, and weak explanation
• Where the analogy stops: experience, responsibility, meaning, and change
• The amplification effect of scale, speed, consistency, and false neutrality
• The elephant in the room: AI taking human jobs
• Designing complementary oversight rather than ceremonial human review

Four Key Takeaways
• A provocative but precise way to compare human and AI judgment.
• Four cognitive behaviors that automation can amplify rather than create.
• A clearer standard for meaningful human oversight.
• Practical checks including counter examples, uncertainty, decision logs and contestability.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz researches how people understand and interact with AI-enabled experiences, particularly in financial decision contexts, where trust and judgment matter. Her background in research, design and communication enables her to connect human cognitive shortcuts with the product and governance choices that amplify them.

Nobody Wants the Skeptic in the Room (Until the AI Goes Wrong)

Every organization racing to adopt AI has a version of the same person. They ask what happens when the model is wrong. They want to know who is accountable. And they won’t let a vague answer slide. Somewhere along the way they get labeled “resistant to change,” “not a team player,” or “a blocker.” Their invitations to weigh in disappear and the project moves on without them.
This talk argues that this is one of the expensive and dangerous mistakes an enterprise can make. In many organizations, the so-called resister is the only person doing real risk management. When we sideline the curious skeptic, we lose the early warning system exactly when AI is moving into high-stakes territory like money, health and employment. This resistance to counter-culture does not just apply to AI. Hence why your curious skeptic is a key player in your company’s decisions.
UX and product professionals and like to say our job is to advocate for the user. That is not enough anymore. The harder job is to be the person who pushes back: on the timeline, the confidence of the decisions, the success metric and the “human in the loop” who is really there for show. This skepticism is uncomfortable for sure. And it can be career-limiting if you do it badly.
This is not a talk about being the loudest dissenter in the room. It separates the curious skeptic from the cynic and the permanent blocker. There’s a real difference between asking hard questions and making every meeting about your doubts and fears. Jen shares practical tactics for pushing back in a way that is tactful, respectful and influential. And in a way that lets you keep your job and your credibility. Her examples draw on working an AI-powered financial experience and her research background where skepticism is a professional discipline, not a personality flaw.
Leaders say they want critical thinking, then reward momentum. Attendees will see how to build skepticism into the operating model through pre-mortems, decision logs, documented dissent and kill criteria. That way, doubt doesn’t depend on one brave person with a high tolerance for awkward silence.
Attendees leave with language, tactics and frameworks. People will know how to be the skeptic without getting sidelined. How to protect the skeptic on their team. And how to make the case that the person slowing down the AI rollout may be the reason it survives.

Talk outline
• The Skeptic Gets Managed Out. How a person asking good questions turns into a “culture problem.”
• Curious Skeptic, Cynic, or Blocker? What separates useful doubt from performative negativity and how to check which one you are.
• What Organizations Lose When They Sideline Doubt. Why momentum, fear of missing out and incentives push skeptics out.
• Advocating for the User Isn’t Enough. The UX and product role as the one who pushes back: on timelines, confidence, metrics and gathering evidence to move forward.
• How to Be the Skeptic and Keep Your Job. Tactics for tactful, respectful, influential pushback.
• Building Space for Dissent. Structural fixes any team can try.
• For Leaders: Keep Your Skeptic. How to tell if you’re rewarding agreement over accuracy. And what to say and do differently.
• A challenge to the audience: name the skeptic on your team, and decide this week whether you’re protecting them or managing them out.

Four key takeaways
• A clear distinction between the curious skeptic, the cynic and the blocker. That way you can own the perception first without becoming the “trouble maker.”
• A toolkit of specific tactics for pushing back on AI decisions in a way that is respectful, influential and career-safe.
• Practical structures that make skepticism part of how the organization operates.
• A stronger case for leaders: the person asking “what if it’s wrong?” is risk management, not resistance.

Why Jen Blatz is qualified
Jen Blatz researches an AI-powered financial experience. She sees daily how trust, uncertainty and failure play out when real people make decisions with AI. She has had to be the curious skeptic several times in tough conversations. And she has navigated the tension between enthusiasm for the technology and the need to question it. She is trained to treat skepticism as a professional discipline, which have taught her to push back in ways that keep her credible and in the room.

When AI Can’t Afford to Be Wrong: AI in High-Stakes Experiences

AI is rapidly moving from novelty to infrastructure. We are no longer asking AI only to recommend a restaurant, summarize a document or rewrite an email. We are putting it into experiences involving money, health, employment, education and identity, where a confusing, incorrect or overconfident response can have significant consequences. That changes the job of UX research.
Drawing from my experience researching an AI-powered financial tool within a financial institution, this talk explores what happens when traditional UX research practices collide with probabilistic technology in a sensitive domain. With conventional products, researchers often evaluate whether people can complete a task, understand an interface or find what they need. With AI, that’s only part of the story. An experience can be usable and still be wrong. It can sound confident and still be misunderstood. It can respond while eroding trust.
This talk examines the questions researchers need to ask about trust, uncertainty, expectations, comprehension, perceived authority, failure and human judgment. It explores the distinction between whether people can use an AI experience and whether they understand when they should trust it, question it or ignore it.
AI research also presents another challenge: the product you’re studying doesn’t always behave the same way twice. Traditional usability research assumes reasonably predictable system behavior. Generative AI complicates that assumption. Researchers need to study not only interfaces and workflows, but the range of responses and behaviors the system can produce, including uncomfortable edge cases.
Most importantly, this isn’t about creating perfectly trustworthy AI. It’s about designing and researching AI that helps people maintain their own judgment.
Using lessons from researching AI in financial services, I’ll introduce a practical framework for researching AI in sensitive and high-stakes contexts: what to test, where conventional methods fall short, how to investigate failure and how to distinguish between an AI experience that merely works and one that demands people’s confidence.

Talk outline
1. When “usable” is no longer good enough
• The fundamental shift from conventional UX to AI UX
2. What working on an AI financial experience changed for me
• Use my internal AI tool as the case study rather than the entire talk. The realities of researching AI around
3. The new research object: the user’s mental model of the AI
• Researchers traditionally study people’s mental models of products. AI adds another dimension: people construct a mental model of the intelligence behind the product.
4. Trust is the wrong question
• Rather than simply asking: “Do people trust the AI?”
• Researchers should investigate things like: transparency, agency, calibration and Competence
5. Research the failure
• What happens when there is not just the happy path
6. A practical framework:
• USE
• UNDERSTAND
• TRUST
• ACT
7. What AI changes about the researcher’s job
• AI researchers increasingly need to think beyond screens and flows.

Four Key Takeaways
• Understanding how an AI experience can be easy to use while still producing misunderstanding, inappropriate trust or poor decisions.
• To make sure that AI experiences are calibrated to trust, where people’s confidence appropriately reflects what the AI can and cannot reliably do.
• What research reveals in high-stakes experiences so that technologists do not make mistakes.
• A research study cover more than interactions with an interface. This talk discusses the importance the of relationship among system behavior, human interpretation and the consequences of acting on AI-generated information.

Jen’s qualifications
As a Principal Experience Researcher, Jen has been conducting user research with an AI-powered, personally-catered, financial experience within a person’s banking ecosystem. This gives her direct experience investigating how people understand, use and respond to AI in the sensitive context of personal finances.
Her perspective combines deep qualitative research experience, mixed methods analysis, with hands-on work examining emerging AI experiences. Her research in the AI space, allows her to move beyond theoretical discussions of “responsible AI” and talk about what researchers actually encounter when real people interact with AI and their decisions around issues that really matter.

We Were Lied To. It’s Not Burn Out.

Burnout is easy to recognize because it is loud: impossible workloads, exhaustion, anxiety and the feeling that everything is on fire. Rust-out is quieter. It can happen when capable people are chronically underused, excluded from meaningful decisions, given work that no longer stretches them or they stay in roles where their expertise is acknowledged but rarely activated. From the outside, the job may look stable. On the inside, curiosity, confidence, and professional identity begin to corrode.
This talk gives experienced professionals language for distinguishing rust-out from ordinary boredom, burnout, a temporary slump, or a genuine desire to leave a field. It explores the warning signs: doing competent work without caring about the outcome, withdrawing from visibility, resenting less-experienced colleagues who receive better opportunities, collecting credentials without changing the work and fantasizing about quitting without knowing what should replace the job.
Rather than thinking that resignation as the only answer, the talk offers a recovery sequence: diagnose the source, restore challenge, rebuild agency, reconnect with people who see your value and run small career experiments. Or, honestly cute and run of that is the best options.
Attendees will leave with a practical way to decide whether the problem is the role, the environment, the profession or the season of life. The goal is not to convince everyone to stay. It is to help people avoid making a permanent decision in response to a condition they have not accurately named.

Talk Outline
• The difference between burn out and rust out.
• The symptoms people misidentify for burnout and rust out and how to identify them
• The hidden costs: confidence erosion, skill atrophy, cynicism and identity loss
• The recovery sequence: how to decide if you want to reconnect or bounce
• The decision point: repair the role, redesign the career or leave deliberately

Four Key Takeaways
• A diagnostic vocabulary for separating rust-out from burnout and temporary boredom.
• A audit of challenge, agency, visibility, learning and relevance.
• Small recovery experiments to try before making an irreversible career move.
• A clearer standard for deciding whether to stay, reshape the role or leave.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz has worked across multiple creative and research disciplines and has experienced the changing expectations placed on senior UX professionals. As a Principal Experience Researcher and frequent conference speaker, she can connect the personal reality of career stagnation with concrete ways to rebuild influence, challenge and professional momentum. Having been a victim of both burn out and rust out, Jen can speak to this topic directly and help others determine where they fall and what they should do moving forward.

Bang! Pow! Combat Imposter Syndrome and Unleash Your True Strengths

Imposter Syndrome (IS) is an issue that affects professionals, in all roles, including people in the User Experience (UX) field. In this talk, I explore the signs of Imposter Syndrome, shedding light on how this phenomenon can impact the work of all types of pros, and offer strategies to overcome it.
Inspired by the book, “Own Your Greatness,” (by Lisa Orbe-Austin and Richard Orbe-Austin) I have come to realize that what I assumed were the characteristics of Imposter Syndrome (IS) are quite different than I originally thought. I actually carry more symptoms of IS than I ever knew. This book has inspired me to help myself, and others, to fight the inner beast and let my inner potential shine through for others to see.
The talk starts with an explanation of Imposter Syndrome, its characteristics and how it manifests in the context of our professional world. Attendees will learn to recognize the signs of Imposter Syndrome, such as over working, self-doubt, fear of judgment and the constant need for validation. For example, by tackling self-doubt and fostering your own confidence, folks can be more empathetic. We can be better contributors to creating user-centered. And pros can contribute to an innovative team culture. I also walk through the common triggers for Imposter Syndrome and how to shift the narrative and break old negative habits. This presentation concludes by showing the audience how to take action and embrace their new roles as valuable members of the UX community.

Key takeaways and learning
• Explanation of Imposter Syndrome, its characteristics and how it manifests in the context of
• The signs and triggers of Imposter Syndrome
• How to take action and embrace their new roles as valuable members of the UX community

Jen’s Experience and Qualifications
Believe it or not, I would hail myself as a Queen of Imposter Syndrome. After reading the book, “On Your Greatness,” I realized that a lot of my burn out, rust out, working too much and anxiety actually were signs of imposter syndrome. Now I would say I am on my road to recovery, recognizing the triggers and changing the narrative. And I am here to help others recognize the signs, treat the symptoms and gain confidence moving forward.

No Deceptive Patterns: Keep Cognitive Biases from Creeping In

Generally, people go into tests with good intentions of gathering accurate, pristine information, so how does all this bias creep in? It’s pretty common to have several psychological biases working against you that can cloud your design and user research. This talk will focus on surfacing some of the darkest types of bias and how to prevent and combat them. Also, learn how to use some of those cognitive biases for good in your designs. No dark patterns here folks.

Outline
Opening hook
Agenda
What is cognitive bias?
What are the signs?
How do you fight it?
How do we use it to our advantage?
Define
Why it matters
Types of bias
Self/You
Blind spot bias
Experimenter’s bias
Observer-expectancy effect
Self vs others
Social comparison bias
Aligning with me/my beliefs
Semmelweis effect
Not Invented Here bias
Social Conformity
Courtesy bias
Recent/long ago
Baader-Meinhoff
Peak-end rule
Use in your design for good
Baader-Meinhoff
Ikea
Humor effect
Bizarre effect
Default effect
It’s a wrap – summary of talk and take-aways

Attendees Gain
Attendees will learn several important terms and practical tips about cognitive bias. This will increase their awareness of cognitive biases, help them to understand how to apply them in positive ways in their design and give them tangible ways to apply the concepts that they learn. It will also help them in future research efforts to prevent “leading the witness” and conduct bias-free research studies.

Experience and Qualifications what I bring about this topic
As a user researcher and designer, I have seen first-hand how these biases can creep into design and research. I have seen designers bias participants by their reactions (observer-expectancy bias). I have seen how I have loaded questions with my own personal (blind spot) bias. By bringing in real and personal examples, I can help others understand how we all have biases and what we can do, as researchers, designers and product partners, to prevent them from making their way into our projects.

What the "F" is UX and how does it fit into an agile world?

There is a lot of confusion about UX. What is it? What’s the difference between UX and UI? How do UX folks relate to and work with developers? And this is just the tip of the iceberg. When the Agile Manifesto was written, UX was not a part of that world. So this brings up even more questions: How is UX supposed to fit in to our company’s agile model? Should UX be part of our agile ceremonies and sprints? How is this all supposed to work. This talk will clarify the mystery of what User Experience is and how to incorporate it in to agile and sprints.

Take aways and key learnings
Clarify what UX (user experience is)
How UX fits with an Agile timeline and framework
How Agile can be implemented in a financial institution

More Connection, Less Cringe: Ignite Relationships In Your Professional World

This talk provides actionable advice on how to network confidently, build lasting relationships, and stay engaged with your professional community, both online and offline.
Learn how to start meaningful conversations with strangers, both in person and online, without feeling awkward.
Discover effective networking strategies for conferences, including using icebreakers and finding common ground with others.
Understand how to engage and build relationships on LinkedIn and within online communities.
Get tips on maintaining connections post-event, from follow-ups to regular engagement.
Explore the power of social media for ongoing networking and visibility in any field.
Whether you're new to connecting, or an experienced professional, this talk will help you navigate the art of networking and strengthen your presence in the finance community.

Take aways and learnings
• Confidence in interacting with and networking others
• Specific tactics on how to connect with others at in person events and online
• Tips on how to maintain relationships to sew seeds for future opportunities

Why I qualify to give this talk
In the UX community, I am known as the connector. For many UX pros, I am just one or two connections away. And I am happy to make an introduction to make the right synergy happen.
I know the importance of building relationships long before you need your network’s help. As a UX researcher, I conducted my own research with several well-known UX pros to create this talk, and to help others. I want people to feel comfortable building out their professional network and know some tactical steps to reach out to others in what feels like a disconnected world.

Presented at
Value UX Conference 2025
UXCon 2025

The Art of Influencing Without Authority

As user experience evolves, generating insight or deliverables are no longer the hardest part. What is? Getting decision-makers to act on the work. Too often, UX folks assume that presenting the facts will automatically drive change. In reality, leaders filter, ignore or even resist evidence if it challenges their identity, priorities or assumptions. Ouch.
This talk equips UX professionals with tactical strategies to influence without authority. Attendees will learn how to frame findings in leadership language, create an infrastructure of trust and make stakeholders co-owners of insights. This is all accomplished while leveraging psychology and relationships.
Through relatable scenarios and practical frameworks, Jen Blatz demonstrates how UX pros can move beyond ego-driven persuasion to evidence-based influence. Attendees will leave with actionable tools to get their work noticed, understood and applied. Thus finally transforming the way they impact their organizations.
This session is ideal for mid-to-senior technology professionals, UX researchers, designers and strategists looking to increase the workplace effectiveness, without having “management” authority over teams or stakeholders.

Outline
Opening: Influence With Authority
• What is influence and why it is important

The Impact framework
• I Infrastructure. Build the Infrastructure of Trust through Relationships.
• M Meeting. But Influence Starts Before the Meeting.
• P The Psychology of the Ask. Small wins and asks lead to bigger responsibility.
• A Act Before Being Asked.
• C Make Stakeholders Collaborators and Co-Authors, Not Audiences
• T Translate Evidence Into Risk, Not Truth.

For the aspect of the framework:
• Quotes for inspiration
• Real-world tactics and approaches
• Using psychology for good

Key Takeaways
• How to frame evidence in a way that aligns with leadership priorities.
• Methods to influence decisions without formal authority or official title.
• Techniques to co-create insights and foster stakeholder buy-in.
• Understanding the psychological barriers that prevent evidence from being heard.

Why Jen is qualified to give this talk
Jen Blatz has decades of experience helping organizations translate UX research into action. She has seen firsthand how long presentations of evidence often fail. Thus she has developed practical, repeatable strategies to influence stakeholders at all levels. Her combined expertise in research, design and strategic leadership equips her to teach attendees how to get research heard, finally, without the management title, org authority or ego – but with measurable impact.

Presented
UX Scotland 2026
WUC World Usability Congress 2026

How to Tame the “Beastly” Challenges of Your Stakeholders

As with any job there are challenges. But as a UX researcher or designer, sometimes we encounter some special “beasts” in our careers. Some days it feels like a struggle just to get our job done, let alone the dilemma of making an impact with our work, and encouraging our partners to implement our recommendations based on the research findings. In this talk I will explore the “5 S’s of UX Professionals” which are some of the biggest challenges that researchers face and the solutions. I will cover why these challenges are happening and what we can do to calm the “beasts” and make the world a better place.

Challenges that UX pros face
• The Skimp Shark
• The Speed Snake
• The Scope Squirrel
• The Slow Sloth
• The Sh#t Skunk

Attendees Gain
Attendees will learn several ways to cope, confront and correct some of the typical challenges they may face on the job.
Explores the battles researchers face and some solutions on how to build relationships
How to recognize signs and help create an environment where their work can make an impact.

Experience and Qualifications what I bring about this topic
As a user researcher, I have experienced challenges in dealing with stakeholders first-hand. By bringing in real and personal examples, I can help others understand how we can navigate these challenges and create better working relationships with our stakeholders.

Presented at
World Usability Congress 2024

Your Reputation Is the Real Resumé.

A resume is a career summary on paper. A portfolio shows selected work under controlled conditions. Reputation is what other people remember, repeat and trust when you are not present. At senior levels, hiring, promotion, speaking invitations and high-stakes assignments are shaped less by the polish of one case study and more by whether colleagues believe you can navigate ambiguity, improve decisions, work across functions and deliver when the stakes are real.
This talk explains why portfolios and resumes become necessary but insufficient as careers progress. It introduces the reputation gap: the difference between what you intend to be known for, what your artifacts claim and what your network actually says. Attendees will audit their reputation across craft, judgment, collaboration, consequence and reality, and identify the stories that travel with their name, including unhelpful ones created by inconsistency, invisibility, tone or overreliance on a single employer’s context.
The session focuses on ethical reputation building rather than personal-brand theater. Participants learn how to make impact legible, share useful points of view, create evidence others can relay and invest in relationships before needing favors. It also covers building credible third-party signals such as recommendations, invitations, referrals and repeated trust.
Finally, the talk addresses reputation repair: what to do when your reputation is outdated, too narrow or attached to a role you have outgrown. Attendees leave with a reputation statement, evidence inventory and 90-day plan for aligning what they do, what they show and what others say.

Talk Outline
Why the resume and portfolio loses power as seniority increases
The reputation gap: intended identity, displayed proof, and repeated story
Four reputation dimensions: craft, judgment, collaboration, consequence
Make impact portable: evidence, points of view, relationships, and third-party signals
Reputation repair and a 90-day alignment plan

Key Takeaways
A practical distinction between resume evidence and reputation capital.
A four-dimension reputation audit for senior professionals.
Ways to build visibility without defaulting to empty self-promotion.
A 90-day plan to align work, proof, and the story others repeat.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz has built a visible professional presence through conference speaking, UX community participation, mentoring and a substantial LinkedIn audience. So it’s safe to say she understands the importance of getting her reputation out they beyond just a resume or portfolio case study. Combined with her senior experience and research leadership, this gives her direct experience with how reputation creates opportunities long before a portfolio review begins.

You’ve Been Doing It Wrong: A Senior Professional’s Confession

Expertise is often presented as a collection of lessons learned. It is also a collection of beliefs discarded. This talk uses the format of a professional confession to examine the practices that once seemed unquestionably correct but became less useful with experience.
Each confession follows the same structure: what I believed, why it made sense, what it cost, the moment it broke and what I do instead. That structure keeps the talk from becoming a list of hot takes. It shows how reasonable professional habits become liabilities when context changes, seniority increases or the work moves from execution to influence.
Attendees are invited to examine their own sacred cows, including methods they defend because of identity, and advice repeated long after the conditions that made it useful have disappeared. The session balances humility with practical replacement behaviors.
Abandoning a rule does not mean abandoning standards. It means replacing ritual with judgment. By the end, participants will have a framework for testing inherited practices, a list of signals that a best practice has become performative, and permission to update how they work without treating earlier versions of themselves as failures.

Talk Outline
• Why seniority should produce unlearning, not just accumulated certainty
• Confessions: process, rigor, neutrality, perfection, and visibility
• The anatomy of a broken best practice: belief, benefit, cost, failure, replacement
• How to challenge sacred cows without becoming casually anti-method
• Build your own unlearning list and choose one replacement experiment

Key Takeaways
• A repeatable way to examine and retire outdated professional beliefs.
• Specific warning signs that best practice has turned into empty ritual.
• Replacement behaviors that preserve rigor while adapting to context.
• Permission to treat changed judgment as growth rather than hypocrisy.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz brings a career spanning decades, giving her multiple professional orthodoxies to compare and question. Her senior-level practical UX experience allows her to turn candid mistakes into specific, useful lessons rather than generic career advice.

Storytelling Is Manipulation. Use It Anyway.

The moment someone decides what evidence to include, what order to present it in and what recommendation to make, they are shaping interpretation. This is manipulation in the literal sense: arranging material to produce understanding and action. The ethical problem is not that storytelling influences people. It’s whether that influence clarifies reality or distorts it.
This talk replaces vague encouragement to “tell a story” with a transparent model for ethical persuasion. Attendees will examine the narrative choices embedded in research reports, dashboards, executive readouts and strategy decks, and learn to distinguish responsible from deceptive framing. The session demonstrates how the same dataset can be made alarming, reassuring, urgent or irrelevant through selection and structure alone.
A practical framework helps you build compelling narratives without pretending the evidence is cleaner than it is: start with the decision, define the stakes, show the strongest evidence, acknowledge what complicates the story and make recommendations proportional to confidence. The talk also covers common abuses, including cherry-picking quotes, skewing data, hiding base rates, turning anecdotes into prevalence claims and using polished visuals to imply certainty. It also emphasizes storytelling across quantitative and qualitative research and how the two methods complement each other.
Attendees leave not with permission to manipulate recklessly, but with a higher standard: acknowledge the persuasive choices, expose the uncertainty and design a story the evidence can survive.

Talk Outline
• The uncomfortable premise: all presentation is selection and framing
• How narratives change interpretation without changing the underlying data
• The importance of marrying qual and quant data
• The ethics test: proportionality, traceability, uncertainty, counterevidence, consequence
• A responsible story structure: decision, stakes, evidence, tension, recommendation
• Live reframing examples and a red-flag checklist for deceptive storytelling

Four Key Takeaways
• An deep dive in to the importance of storytelling as purposeful framing.
• A multi-question ethics test for evidence-based narratives.
• Specific warning signs for problems in storytelling and how to correct.
• A repeatable structure for persuasive, decision-ready research presentations.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz is a Principal Experience Researcher with more than a decade in UX research and earlier experience in UX design and graphic design. She regularly translates complex evidence into practical decisions for product leaders and speaks at UX and industry conferences, giving her both the practitioner depth and presentation experience to make this topic credible and useful. Jen has seen data fall flat and drive decisions, all due to poor communication and storytelling. She knows how important it is to tell a compelling story and wants attendees to feel to feel confident in doing so as well.

What to Do When They Don’t Like You

It’s easy to communicate when everyone agrees with you. The real test comes when they don’t. Or when you realize halfway through the conversation that the people in the room have already made up their minds.
Welcome to one of the most uncomfortable parts of working in UX, product and technology: sometimes they’re just not buying what you’re selling. And when you care deeply about your work, it’s difficult not to take that personally.
Drawing on nearly three decades working in design, UX and research, Jen Blatz explores what happens when professional expertise collides with skepticism, organizational politics, strong personalities, conflicting evidence and plain old disagreement.
This practical session isn’t about the perfect comeback or winning every argument. It’s about recognizing what’s actually happening in the room and choosing the right response. Jen examines moments that can send even experienced professionals into fight, flight or freeze mode: interruptions, hostile questions, demands for certainty, challenges to your credibility, missing information, conflicting opinions and the dreaded “What would you do?” question.
You’ll learn techniques for slowing down difficult interactions, answering without becoming defensive, setting boundaries around what you know and don’t know, and redirecting conversations that are going off the rails.
Being an effective UX professional doesn’t mean convincing everyone you’re right. It means knowing when to advocate, when to question, when to acknowledge uncertainty, when to push back and when to let someone else make the decision.

Talk Outline
1. Oh Crap. They Don’t Like This.
• We’ll start with those painfully recognizable moments.
• And the internal reaction many of us have: defend yourself.
• Why that instinct often makes the situation worse.

2. Figure Out What They’re Actually Fighting
• Not all pushback is the same.
• Someone might be challenging you with the common questions we hear.
• The first skill is learning to diagnose the resistance before responding to it.

3. Surviving the Questions Nobody Wants to Get
• Practical ways to respond to tough questions.
• Including something UX professionals desperately need permission to say: “I don’t know.”
• And how to say it without sounding unprepared.

4. Stop Treating Every Challenge Like a Debate
• Some questions require answers. And occasionally, someone just wants to argue.
• We’ll look at how to recognize the difference and decide whether to answer, question, redirect, park, or disengage.

5. Separate Yourself From Your Work
• Why criticism feels personal.
• Why seniority doesn’t necessarily make that feeling disappear.
• How to avoid becoming defensive.
• Letting go when someone else owns the decision.

6. When the Meeting Goes Completely Off the Rails
• How to recover after getting rattled.
• Regain control after an interruption.
• Stop one person from hijacking a conversation.
• Ways to handle questions you are not prepared for.
• Approaches to correct yourself without destroying your credibility.
• How to follow up after a difficult interaction.
• When to decide a contentious conversation needs to move offline.

7. The Five-Step “They Don’t Like Me” Survival Guide Framework
• Pause > Diagnose > Respond > Bound > Redirect

4 Key Takeaways
• Learn to identify whether someone is questioning the evidence, process, recommendation, implications or your credibility before deciding how to respond.
• Recognize where your knowledge ends and resist the pressure to manufacture certainty.
• Understand that being effective means making your case clearly, documenting the trade-offs, and allowing the person accountable for the decision to make it.
• Learn how to recover, not how to be perfect.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz is a Principal Experience Researcher with nearly 30 years of experience. Through those years, not all encounters with stakeholders and team mates has been positive. Jen has firsthand experience presenting ideas, evidence and recommendations from multiple sides of the UX profession. Her work in design and research expands to another layer of complexity: communicating with cross-functional teams when the technology, customer expectations, evidence and even the questions themselves are constantly evolving.

Present Your Work Fast: Use Spontaneous Talks Frameworks

We know that articulating our decisions or presenting the value of our user research to stakeholders can sometimes be a challenge. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks have been around for years. They are often taught at universities and are used to help people think of answers or tell stories fast and smart. Jen is going to teach you a few Spontaneous Talks Frameworks so you can use them when presenting your work, answering tough questions or simply telling your stories. Applying these simple frameworks can help a person avoid anxiety by quickly organizing a thought, and moving forward to articulating that thought in a cohesive and eloquent manner.

Outline
• What are Spontaneous Talks Frameworks
• Why are they used?
• How to get in the mindset
• For each:
o What is it
o How do you apply that to UX presentations
o Example
• What? So What? Now What?
• OSB Problem/Opportunity – Solution – Benefit
• STAR Situation Task Action Result
• PREP Point. Reason. Example. Point.
• BLUF Bottom Line Up Front
• PPP Prep Promise Path
• ADD Answer Detail Describe value
• PPO
• RRR Regret Reason Repair

Notes
They saying goes: practice makes perfect. But sometimes we do not have the luxury of practicing in advance. This is especially true when we have to share at the last minute or answer a question on the spot. Having a Spontaneous Storytelling Frameworks to pull from can keep your anxiety low, help you quickly get organized, and move you forward with a cohesive answer. Every UX pro should have the confidence to present eloquently and precisely. Having frameworks like these in your back pocket can prevent you from rambling. And it helps you to provide the well-described information your stakeholders are seeking.

Jen’s qualifications
I have successfully used these frameworks in presenting my own work. Plus, I have presented this talk to many conferences around the world (talk length and workshop formats).

The 4-Minute Pitch: Get a Yes Before They Check Their Phone

Many good ideas lose because they arrive as background-heavy explanations instead of decisions. This talk teaches a disciplined four-minute pitch that respects limited attention without reducing the idea to hype.
Attendees will see the four-part format applied to research recommendations, product proposals, headcount requests, process changes, and applicable professional scenarios. The talk also covers what to remove, like details that do not affect the decision, defensive qualifiers and multiple competing asks. Participants leave with a fill-in template, a rehearsal checklist, and methods for handling the two questions that usually follow: “How do you know?” and “What exactly do you need from me?” The goal is not merely brevity. It is decision clarity.

Talk Outline
• Why good ideas die in the setup
• The four-minute structure.
• Time constraints and what to focus on
• Examples applied to different professional scenarios

Key Takeaways
• A multi-part pitch structure for effective and concise communication.
• A time budget that forces prioritization without sacrificing credibility.
• Clear rules for removing irrelevant information and competing asks.
• A rehearsal method for answering evidence and resource questions after the pitch.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz regularly presents research, strategy, data and recommendations to audiences with limited time and competing priorities. Her experience as a principal researcher and seasoned professional allows her to demonstrate how to preserve evidence, keep stakeholder attention, while making the ask clearer and faster.