Blythe takes digital user experience to next level

As a design leader in the tech sector, Jason Blythe ’02 (graphic design), ’05 MFA (visual communication design) has built a career anticipating and enhancing the way in which people use technology to search for information, shop online, and stream sports and entertainment.

Blythe joined Amazon Prime Video in early 2025 to lead a new User Experience (UX) division, composed of 30 designers, engineers, and product and project managers focused on user research, design features, and technology.

As the UX director, Blythe oversees efforts to improve Prime’s personalization, search capability, and content discovery for its more than 250 million subscribers.

Indispensable user data helps to improve digital interfaces and features, such as Prime’s viewer recommendations. User behaviors, histories, and preferences give design and technology teams the big picture of subscriber activity. Likewise, Blythe said, zooming in on anonymous user behavior humanizes the data and lends insights that can also apply to the larger subscriber base.

Blythe gives an example from his previous 13 years working at Google, where he led design teams in Google Search Ads, Google Shopping, and Google Image Search/Video Search and rose to UX Director for Google Search Labs.

He redesigned Google’s homepage and search results page, and often facilitated sessions with his team, filtering anonymous search data to use as case studies for improving search results.

A search that began with a query of men’s dress shirts, for example, led a user to click on an article from Gentleman’s Quarterly about what to wear at a job interview.

“Ten minutes later, presumably after they had read the article, they did another query about how to tie a tie,” Blythe said. “You start to get a sense of what’s going on with the user in the moment.”

Comparing the query results with the user’s selections can provide useful information for improving a particular type of search.

“Then you analyze 100 more sessions, and you come up with 100 different answers,” he said. “For me, that’s when the design process begins. I try to see the users in the human context. That gives me the best knowledge about what’s working well and what we need to fix to make the users’ journey better for them.”

Today, Blythe looks to user behavior to measure the success of digital tools built for exploring the Prime library. Direct user feedback further helps his teams refine new products.

“A big part is stepping back from all of that and having some intuition and vision about where the product should be in the future,” he said.

An active alumnus, Blythe maintains strong ties to RIT as a member of the College of Art and Design’s National Council and as an invited speaker.

Because of him, Google representatives attend RIT’s Creative Industry Days and encourage a pipeline of RIT design students. He hopes to do the same with Amazon Prime Video in the future.

“I wanted to support Creative Industry Days because they didn’t exist when I was a student,” Blythe said. “These kinds of experiences and feedback are really important to students.”