Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Are you preparing for a technical interview in the tech industry? Whether you’re aiming for a software engineering position, data science role, or any other tech-related job, mastering technical interviews with ChatGPT is key to landing your dream role. In...
The post Mastering Technical Interviews with ChatGPT appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
Do you recognize this situation? The marketing and business teams talk about their customers, and each team thinks they have the same understanding of the problem and what needs to be done. Then, they’re including the Product and UX team in the conversation around how to best serve a particular customer group and where to invest in development and marketing efforts. They’ve done their initial ideation and are trying to prioritize, but this turns into a long discussion with the different teams favoring different areas to focus on. Suddenly, an executive highlights that instead of this customer segment, there should be a much higher focus on an entirely different segment — and the whole discussion starts again.
This situation often arises when there is no joint-up understanding of the different customer segments a company is serving historically and strategically. And there is no shared understanding beyond using the same high-level terms. To reach this understanding, you need to dig deeper into segment definitions, goals, pain points, and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) so as to enable the organization to make evidence-based decisions instead of having to rely on top-down prioritization.
The hardest part about doing the right thing for your user or customers (please note I’m aware these terms aren’t technically the same, but I’m using them interchangeably in this article so as to be useful to a wider audience) often starts inside your own company and getting different teams with diverging goals and priorities to agree on where to focus and why.
But how do you get there — thinking user-first AND ensuring teams are aligned and have a shared mental model of primary and secondary customer segments?
Personas vs SegmentsTo explore that further, let’s take a brief look at the most commonly applied techniques to better understand customers and communicate this knowledge within organizations.
Two frequently employed tools are user personas and user segmentation.
Product/UX (or non-demographic) personas aim to represent the characteristics and needs of a certain type of customer, as well as their motivations and experience. The aim is to illustrate an ideal customer and allow teams to empathize and solve different use cases. Marketing (or demographic) personas, on the other hand, traditionally focus on age, socio-demographics, education, and geography but usually don’t include needs, motivations, or other contexts. So they’re good for targeting but not great for identifying new potential solutions or helping teams prioritize.
In contrast to personas, user segments illustrate groups of customers with shared needs, characteristics, and actions. They are relatively high-level classifications, deliberately looking at a whole group of needs without telling a detailed story. The aim is to gain a broader overview of the wider market’s wants and needs.
Tony Ulwick, creator of the “jobs-to-be-done” framework, for example, creates outcome-based segmentations, which are quite similar to what this article is proposing. Other types of segmentations include geographic, psychographic, demographic, or needs-based segmentations. What all segmentations, including the user segmentation matrix, have in common is that the segments are different from each other but don‘t need to be mutually exclusive.
As Simon Penny points out, personas and segments are tools for different purposes. While customer segments help us understand a marketplace or customer base, personas help us to understand more about the lived experience of a particular group of customers within that marketplace.
Both personas and segmentations have their applications, but this article argues that using a matrix will help you prioritize between the different segments. In addition, the key aspect here is the co-creation process that fosters understanding across departments and allows for more transparent decision-making. Instead of focusing only on the outcome, the process of getting there is what matters for alignment and collaboration across teams. Let’s dig deeper into how to achieve that.
User Segmentation Matrix: 101At its core, the idea of the user segmentation matrix is meant to create a shared mental model across teams and departments of an organization to enable better decision-making and collaboration.
And it does that by visualizing the relevance and differences between a company’s customer segments. Crucially, input into the matrix comes from across teams as the process of co-creation plays an essential part in getting to a shared understanding of the different segments and their relevance to the overall business challenge.
Additionally, this kind of matrix follows the principle of “just enough, not too much” to create meaning without going too deep into details or leading to confusion. It is about pulling together key elements from existing tools and methods, such as User Journeys or Jobs-to-be-done, and visualizing them in one place.
For a high-level first overview, see the matrix scaffolding below.
Let’s look at the problem through a case study and see how building a user segmentation matrix helped a global data products organization gain a much clearer view of its customers and priorities.
Here is some context. The organization was partly driven by NGO principles like societal impact and partly by economic concerns like revenue and efficiencies. Its primary source of revenue was raw data and data products, and it was operating in a B2B setting. Despite operating for several decades already, its maturity level in terms of user experience and product knowledge was low, while the amount of different data outputs and services was high, with a whole bouquet of bespoke solutions for individual clients. The level of bespoke solutions that had to be maintained and had grown organically over time had surpassed the “featuritis” stage and turned utterly unsustainable.
And you probably guessed it: The business focus had traditionally been “What can we offer and sell?” instead of “What are our customers trying to solve?”
That means there were essentially two problems to figure out:
For full disclosure, here’s a bit about my role in this context: I was there in a fractional product leader role at first, after running a discovery workshop, which then developed into product strategy work and eventually a full evaluation of the product portfolio according to user & business value.
ApproachSo how did we get to that outcome? Basically, we spent an afternoon filling out a table with different customer segments, presented it to a couple of stakeholders, and everyone was happy — THE END. You can stop reading…
Or not, because from just a few initial conversations and trying to find out if there were any existing personas, user insights, or other customer data, it became clear that there was no shared mental model of the organization’s customer segments.
At the same time, the Business and Account management teams, especially, had a lot of contact with new and existing customers and knew the market and competition well. And the Marketing department had started on personas. However, they were not widely used and weren’t able to act as that shared mental model across different departments.
So, instead of thinking customer-first the organization was operating “inside-out first,” based on the services they offered. With the user segmentation matrix, we wanted to change this perspective and align all teams around one shared canvas to create transparency around user and business priorities.
But How To Proceed Quickly While Taking People Along On The Journey?Here’s the approach we took:
First, we gathered all user insights, customer feedback, and data from different parts of the organization and mapped them out on a big board (see below). Initially, we really tried to map out all existing documentation, including links to in-house documents and all previous attempts at separating different user groups, analytics data, revenue figures, and so on.
The key here was to speak to people in different departments to understand how they were currently thinking about their customers and to include the terms and documentation they thought most relevant without giving them a predefined framework. We used the dimensions of the matrix as a conversation guide, e.g., asking about their definitions for key user groups and what makes them distinctly different from others.
Secondly, we created the draft matrix with assumed segments and some core elements that have proven useful in different UX techniques.
In this step, we started to make sense of all the information we had collected and gave the segments “draft labels” and “draft definitions” based on input from the teams, but creating this first draft version within the small working group. The aim was to reduce complexity, settle on simple labels, and introduce primary vs secondary groups based on the input we received.
We then made sure to run this summarized draft version past the stakeholders for feedback and amends, always calling out the DRAFT status to ensure we had buy-in across teams before removing that label. In addition to interviews, we also provided direct access to the workboard for stakeholders to contribute asynchronously and in their own time and to give them the option to discuss with their own teams.
In the next step, we went through several rounds of “joint sense-making” with stakeholders from across different departments. At this stage, we started coloring in the scaffolding version of the matrix with more and more detail. We also asked stakeholders to review the matrix as a whole and comment on it to make sure the different business areas were on board and to see the different priorities between, e.g., primary and secondary user groups due to segment size, pain points, or revenue numbers.
We then promoted specifically for insights around segment definitions, pain points, goals, jobs to be done, and defining differences to other segments. Once the different labels and the sorting into primary versus secondary groups were clear, we tried to make sure that we had similar types of information per segment so that it would be easy to compare different aspects across the matrix.
Finally, we made sure the core structure reached different levels of leadership. While we made sure to include senior stakeholders in the process throughout, this step was essential prior to circulating the matrix widely across the organization.
However, due to the previous steps, we had gone through, at this point, we were able to assure senior leadership that their teams had contributed and reviewed several times, so getting that final alignment was easy.
We did this in a team of two external consultants and three in-house colleagues, who conducted the interviews and information gathering exercises in tandem with us. Due to the size and global nature of the organization and various different time zones to manage, it took around 3 weeks of effort, but 3 months in time due to summer holidays and alignment activities. So we did this next to other work, which allowed us to be deeply plugged into the organization and avoid blind spots due to having both internal and external perspectives.
Building on in-house advocates with deep organizational knowledge and subject-matter expertise was a key factor and helped bring the organization along much better than purely external consultants could have done.
User Segmentation Matrix: Key IngredientsSo, what are the dimensions we included in this mapping out of primary and secondary user segments?
The dimensions we used were the following:
This is an example of a user segmentation matrix:
What we found in this work is that seeing all user segments mapped out next to each other helped focus the conversation and create a shared mental model that switched the organization’s perspective to outside-in and customer-first.
Establishing the different user segment names and defining primary versus secondary segments created transparency, focus, and a shared understanding of priorities.
Building this matrix based on stakeholder interviews and existing user insights while keeping the labeling in DRAFT mode, we encouraged feedback and amends and helped everyone feel part of the process. So, rather than being a one-time set visualization, the key to creating value with this matrix is to encourage conversation and feedback loops between teams and departments.
In our case, we made sure that every stakeholder (at different levels within the organization, including several people from the executive team) had seen this matrix at least twice and had the chance to input. Once we then got to the final version, we were sure that we had an agreement on the terminology, issues, and priorities.
Below is the real case study example (with anonymized inputs):
So what did this approach help us achieve?
In terms of the challenges we faced when conducting and planning this work, there are a few things to watch out for:
We found that due to the size and global nature of the organization, it took several rounds of feedback to align with all stakeholders on the draft versions. So, the larger the size of your organization, the more buffer time to include (or the ability to change interview partners at short notice).
If you’re planning to do this in a startup or mid-sized organization, especially if they’ve got the relevant information available, you might need far less time, although it will still make sense to carefully select the contributors.
Having in-house advocates who actively contributed to the work and conducted interviews was a real benefit for alignment and getting buy-in across the organization, especially when things started getting political.
Gathering information from Marketing, Product, Business, Sales and Leadership and sticking with their terms and definitions initially was crucial, so everyone felt their inputs were heard and saw it reflected, even if amended, in the overall matrix.
And finally, a challenge that’s not to be underestimated is the selection of those asked to input — where it’s a tightrope walk between speed and inclusion.
We found that a “snowball system” worked well, where we initially worked with the C-level sponsor to define the crucial counterparts at the leadership level and have them name 3-4 leads in their organization, looking after different parts of the organization. These leaders were asked for their input and their team’s input in interviews and through asynchronous access to the joint workboard.
What’s In It For You?To summarize, the key benefits of creating a user segmentation matrix in your organization are the following:
If you already have a clearly defined set of customer segments that your organization is in agreement on and working towards — good for you; you won’t need this and can rely on your existing data.
Another case where you will likely not need this full overview is when you’re dealing with a very specific customer segment, and there is good alignment between the teams serving this group in terms of focus, priorities, and goals.
Organizations that will see the highest value in this exercise are those who are not yet thinking outside-in and customer-first and who still have a traditional approach, starting from their own services and dealing with conflicting priorities between departments.
Next StepsAnd now? You’ve got your beautiful and fully aligned customer segmentation matrix ready and done. What’s next? In all honesty, this work is never done, and this is just the beginning.
If you have been struggling with creating an outside-in perspective in your organization, the key is to make sure that it gets communicated far and wide.
For example, make sure to get your executive sponsors to talk about it in their rounds, do a road show, or hold open office hours where you can present it to anyone interested and give them a chance to ask questions. Or even better, present it at the next company all-hands, with the suggestion to start building up an insights library per customer segment.
If this was really just the starting point to becoming more product-led, then the next logical step is to assess and evaluate the current product portfolio. The aim is to get clarity around which services or products are relevant for which customers. Especially in product portfolios plagued by “featuritis,” it makes sense to do a full audit, evaluate both user and business value, and clean out your product closet.
If you’ve seen gaps and blind spots in your matrix, another next step would be to do some deep dives, customer interviews, and discovery work to fill those. And as you continue on that journey towards more customer-centricity, other tools from the UX and product tool kit, like mapping out user journeys and establishing a good tracking system and KPIs, will be helpful so you can start measuring customer satisfaction and continue to test and learn.
Like a good map, it helps you navigate and create a shared understanding across departments. And this is its primary purpose: getting clarity and focus across teams to enable better decision-making. The process of co-creating a living document that visualizes customer segments is at least as important here as the final outcome.
Are you looking to remove blocks in WordPress?
Removing, hiding, or deleting unnecessary blocks that are part of the content editor can clean up your block menu. It also helps you be more focused by making it easier to find the specific blocks you need quickly.
In this article, we will show you step-by-step instructions on how to remove a block in WordPress.
If you have a WordPress blog, then you will be using the Gutenberg editor to create blog posts and pages for your website. Here, you will notice some blocks in the menu that you will probably never use on your site.
For instance, the content editor offers a Verse block that can be used to insert poetry or song lyrics. However, if you have a food or fashion blog, then this core block is completely irrelevant to your content.
In that case, you can just remove these blocks from the post editor to create a cleaner and more focused interface.
However, if you don’t want to remove the block and its functionality, then you can use the default block visibility feature in WordPress to hide it. This way, the block is not completely removed, and you can easily access it if you need to.
On the other hand, if you have made a mistake on your post or want to delete some content, then you don’t need to remove or hide a block for it. You can just delete that specific block within the post.
This will delete the content you added using that block without removing the block from WordPress completely. For example, if you have added multiple heading blocks, then you can delete one of them to make your content more readable.
Having said that, let’s see how to easily remove blocks in WordPress. We have added four methods in this tutorial, and you can use the links below to jump to the method of your choice:
If you want to delete blocks in your content, then this method is for you. Keep in mind that these blocks won’t be removed from the block menu but will be deleted from the WordPress blog posts that they were a part of.
First, you need to select the block that you plan to delete by simply clicking into it.
After that, click the three-dot icon in the block toolbar to open a prompt. From here, select the ‘Delete’ option to remove the block from your blog post.
On the other hand, if you want to delete multiple blocks in the content, then you can also do that. First, you must select all the blocks you want to remove by dragging your mouse through all of them.
After that, click the three-dot icon in the block toolbar and click the ‘Delete’ option in the prompt.
If you are looking for a shortcut, then you can even delete a block in the content editor by clicking the Shift + Alt + Z buttons for Windows and Linux and ⌃ + ⌥ + Z buttons for macOS.
If you don’t want to completely remove a block, then use this method.
You can use the WordPress block visibility feature to hide the block from the menu and easily bring it back whenever you need it.
To do this, you must open the block editor and click the three-dot icon at the top right corner of the screen. This will open the dropdown menu from where you must select the ‘Preferences’ option.
This will open a popup on the screen. Here, switch to the ‘Blocks’ tab and just uncheck the boxes next to the blocks you want to hide in the post editor.
You can also disable plugin blocks from here like the WPForms block or Soliloquy block.
Once you are done, just click the ‘X’ icon to exit the prompt. You have now successfully hidden the blocks in WordPress.
To view the results, click the ‘+’ button at the top left corner to open the block menu. Here, you will notice that the blocks you chose are not visible anymore.
When you want to bring back those blocks, just click the three-dot icon again and select the preferences option.
Once the popup opens up, switch to the ‘Blocks’ tab and click the ‘Reset’ link to make the blocks visible again.
However, the only con with this method is that you cannot unhide individual blocks. This means that even if you want to make one of the hidden blocks visible, clicking the ‘Reset’ link will unhide all your chosen blocks.
If this seems like a problem to you, then you can use the next method.
You can use this method if you want to completely remove the default blocks in the WordPress editor, like the image, paragraph, heading, code, or preformatted block.
To remove a core WordPress block, you will need to add a PHP code snippet to your theme files, which can break your site or make it inaccessible if you make a mistake.
That is why we recommend using WPCode instead. It is the best WordPress code snippets plugin on the market and the safest way to add custom code to your website.
Note: You can use the free version of WPCode for this tutorial. However, upgrading to the pro plan will unlock more features.
First, you need to install and activate the WPCode plugin. For details, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, visit the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Use Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.
This will direct you to the ‘Create Custom Snippet’ page where you must add a name for the code snippet that you are creating.
Then, choose ‘PHP Snippet’ as the Code Type from the dropdown menu on the right.
After that, you need to add the following custom code into the ‘Code Preview’ box:
add_filter( 'allowed_block_types_all', function( $allowed_blocks, $editor_context ): array {
$allowed_blocks = [
'core/paragraph',
'core/heading',
'core/list',
'core/list-item',
'core/quote',
'core/preformatted',
'core/pullquote',
'core/table',
'core/gallery',
'core/image',
'core/video',
'core/spacer',
'core/separator',
'core/shortcode',
'core/embed',
];
return $allowed_blocks;
}, 100, 2 );
Once you do that, you will notice that the code has a list of some core WordPress blocks that you will need for your site. All the other blocks that are not mentioned in this list, like the ‘Verse’ block, will automatically be removed from the block editor.
However, if you also want to remove one of the blocks that is mentioned in the code like the ‘Separator’ block, then you can just delete it from the code snippet.
Similarly, if a block is not mentioned in the code snippet but you don’t want to remove it, then you can add its name to the list of blocks.
You can easily do that by typing ‘core/’ and then adding the block’s name like this:
‘core/verse’ ,
Next, scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and select the ‘Auto Insert’ mode.
Once you do that, the custom code will automatically be executed on your site upon activation.
Then, scroll back to the top and toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’.
Finally, click the ‘Save Snippet’ button to store your settings.
You can now visit the block editor to see the changes in action.
Here, you will notice that the classic, cover, separator, file, and many other blocks will be removed from the block menu because they were not part of your code snippet list.
This method can be used when you want to remove a block that was introduced by a plugin.
Many WordPress plugins add blocks in the content editor. These blocks make it super easy to add the plugin’s functionality to your blog posts or page.
For instance, All in One for WordPress adds FAQ, breadcrumbs, table of contents, and HTML sitemaps blocks to the content editor.
However, sometimes, you may not want to use one of the blocks offered by the plugin because you feel it is irrelevant to your content. In that case, you can remove the plugin’s block using custom code.
To do this, you will need WPCode, which is the best code snippets plugin and the safest way to add custom code to your website.
First, you need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. For details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, visit the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard. Here, click the ‘Use Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.
Once on the ‘Create Custom Snippet’ page, you can start by adding a name for your code snippet for identification purposes.
Then, choose ‘PHP Snippet’ as the Code Type from the dropdown menu on the right.
After that, add the following code snippet into the code preview box:
Just keep in mind to replace the plugin block’s name with the block you want to remove.
add_action( 'init', function() {
unregister_block_type( 'aioseo/breadcrumbs' );
}, PHP_INT_MAX );
To get this name, you must open the Gutenberg editor and add the plugin block to the page/post.
Then, click the three-dot icon at the top right corner of the screen to open the dropdown menu. From here, switch to the code editor.
Once you do that, you will notice that the code editor will display the block name right after wp.
Go ahead and copy this name and head back to the ‘Create Custom Snippet’ page where you must paste it.
Then, scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and select the ‘Auto Insert’ mode.
This option will automatically execute the custom code snippet upon activation.
After that, toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’.
Next, click the ‘Save Snippet’ button at the top to store your settings.
Now, open the block editor on your WordPress website and search for the block that you removed.
Here, you will see that the block you removed will still be displayed in the menu, but once you add it to the page or post, it will just show an invalid block error.
Aside from hiding unnecessary blocks, creating and using reusable blocks is another way to save time and effort. This is a block that can be saved and used later in other pages and posts.
For example, you can create a reusable block for CTA, feedback forms, affiliate products, and more. To do this, you must open the block editor and type the content that you want to convert into a reusable block.
After that, click the three-dot icon in the block toolbar to open a dropdown menu. From here, select the ‘Create Pattern’ option.
Then, just add a name for your block and click the ‘Create’ button to store your settings.
Now, the reusable block will be saved in the WordPress database, and you can easily add it to your pages or posts using the block menu.
For more information, see our tutorial on how to create a reusable block in WordPress.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily remove blocks in WordPress. You may also want to see our beginner’s guide on how to use the WordPress block editor and our list of common block editor problems and how to fix them.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post How to Remove a Block in WordPress (4 Easy Methods) first appeared on WPBeginner.