Jan Emard-Roob

Why this persona fits the audience

Freelances in UX and is co-building a climate-data dashboard with one developer friend and a volunteer policy analyst. Tracks outreach for potential collaborators in Sheets and meets prospects through community Discords and meetups.

• Age: 34
• Location: London, UK
• Occupation: Product designer
• Income: £88k
• Education: Master's degree
• Years in role: 11

“I spend my days designing interfaces for other people's problems, but I'm trying to build something that actually helps solve the ones we're all staring at right now.”

Jan Emard-Roob, 34, is a seasoned product designer based in East London, navigating the precarious balance between financial stability and deep personal mission. Holding a Master's in Interaction Design from Central Saint Martins, she spent eight years in-house at major agencies before striking out as a freelancer four years ago. This transition allowed her the autonomy to curate clients who align with her ethical standards, though it introduced the constant anxiety of variable income. Currently earning approximately £88k annually, she reinvests a significant portion of her profits into her side project: a climate-data dashboard aimed at making complex carbon metrics accessible to policymakers. This initiative is a labor of love, co-founded with a senior developer friend from university and supported by a volunteer policy analyst she met at a GreenTech hackathon in Manchester. Jan's workflow is a testament to her conscientious nature; she meticulously tracks every interaction with potential collaborators in a bespoke Google Sheet, organizing hundreds of leads from various Discord channels and local meetups. Despite her success, she feels the weight of the 'hustle culture' that often overshadows genuine collaboration. Her recent decision to stop attending large, noisy networking events in favor of intimate, focused working groups reflects her growing preference for quality connections over quantity. She is currently grappling with how to scale this side project without compromising the integrity of its core mission or burning out her limited free time. To her, design is not just about aesthetics but about creating clear pathways for understanding, a philosophy she applies rigorously to both her paid work and her dream of a greener future.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Jan's typical weekday begins at 6:30 AM with thirty minutes of yoga and a black coffee, followed by a quick review of the day's priorities in her digital planner. By 8:00 AM, she is logged into her client's Figma file, tackling a critical redesign of a checkout flow that needs to go live by Friday. Lunch is a brisk affair—a homemade salad eaten at her desk while listening to a podcast on urban resilience. Afternoon hours shift gears around 2:00 PM, when she switches contexts to her side project. This involves updating her master spreadsheet with new contacts from a recent climate meetup, drafting a polite follow-up email to a potential policy partner, and sketching wireframes for the new dashboard component. The evening is reserved for a community call with her developer friend, where they debate API structures, followed by winding down with a book on behavioral economics. She rarely works past 8:00 PM, strictly protecting her sleep to maintain her mental clarity for the next day's dual demands.

Lifestyle

Jan lives in a converted warehouse unit in Dalston, surrounded by exposed brick and houseplants that struggle to survive the London winter. Her routine is a blend of rigid structure and flexible creativity; she wakes at 6:30 AM for a yoga session before diving into client work by 8:00 AM. Financially, she practices 'conscious frugality,' prioritizing savings for a future mortgage while splurging on high-quality ergonomic gear and organic coffee. She maintains a vibrant social life centered around local meetups and community dinners, often hosting friends who are also navigating freelance careers or side hustles. Health is a priority, with a strict commitment to walking to work when possible and cooking fresh meals from her weekly Sainsbury's haul, avoiding processed foods despite her busy schedule.

Work life

Her primary income comes from freelance UX contracts for fintech startups in Shoreditch, where she spends her days refining design systems and conducting user research via Zoom. She operates out of a home office equipped with dual monitors and a Wacom tablet, maintaining a professional yet cozy atmosphere. The reality of her role involves constant context switching between high-stakes client deliverables and the chaotic energy of her climate-tech side project. She manages friction daily by using Notion for client timelines and Google Sheets for tracking her own project outreach, often feeling the pressure of unpaid administrative tasks eating into her creative time. Coworkers are mostly asynchronous, leading to moments of isolation that she mitigates by scheduling virtual coffee chats with other freelancers.

Relationships

Jan is the glue holding her small network together, acting as the primary connector between her freelance peers and the climate-tech community. She has a close-knit circle of three friends from university who also live in London, meeting monthly for board games. Her relationship with her parents is warm but distant geographically; they worry about her freelance instability. She relies heavily on her Discord communities for professional validation and support, viewing them as her modern 'water cooler'.

How they decide

Jan approaches decisions with a 'test-and-learn' methodology. She rarely commits to significant changes without gathering qualitative data first, often seeking peer opinions in niche forums before acting. While she values efficiency, she is willing to invest time in manual processes if the outcome justifies the impact. She avoids impulsive spending, preferring to prototype ideas mentally or on paper before committing resources, and tends to trust recommendations from trusted community members over broad advertising claims.

How they sound

Her speech is articulate and precise, reflecting her background in design thinking, but she frequently uses analogies related to building and systems. She speaks with a calm, measured cadence, often pausing to choose the most accurate word rather than relying on filler. In casual settings, she adopts a warmer, more colloquial tone, dropping formalities but retaining a logical structure. She avoids jargon when speaking to non-designers, preferring plain English to explain complex concepts. She tends to frame questions collaboratively, using phrases like 'Have you considered...' or 'What if we tried...' rather than making declarative statements.