

Discover more from Metric by Michael Schofield
This letter began as a primer on what user-experience design looks like deep in the stack, and it devolved into therapy. If you find it a little woo, I rounded-up some things worth your time below.
What I wrote:
You donât need âUXâ in your title.
Sensemaking (a roundup): GPT-3, âSamwising,â and Linguistic Relativity
Metric: first-contact resolution rate.
You donât need âUXâ in your title.
In January I got a title change. It wasnât from an internal application to a new position, or by otherwise jumping to a ship coasting in the direction of some different shore, but the gradual culmination of something like tides eroding a shore. Given enough time, you look up and see the landscapeâs changed. What I was called no longer reflected what I was doing.
I was the Lead of UX Development, but then became the Director of Engineering.
Since high school Iâve taken fancy to the Sapir-Whorf hypoethsis that the structure of language affects its speakersâ worldview. It has - ah - been discredited, at least the hardcore version purporting that language determines thought. That languages make their speakers slightly more inclined to think in certain ways, however? True - or trueish.
If it wasnât clear since I started beating this wardrum in 2015, I care about vocabulary we use performing UX work. Whether itâs that the user experience is a metric, or that customer-experience design is a subset of user-experience design, or that when we talk about products weâre more properly describing services, I enjoy looking for meaning in this bullshit.
So, what symbolically happened in January was the acceptance that the trajectory of my career leads away from UX - or, rather, UX titles. To me, this matters. Do I imagine I am taken less seriously among UX folks because it is perceived I no longer belong? Probably. Do I have less to write you about because of the change? Definitely.
I am looking at a draft I started last year â and I donât write long posts, so you know itâs just been sitting around with no good reason to be posted already â called âRedefining the UX Developer,â in which I discard the current prevailing definition of a user-research infused coder and cast it more literally: the responsibility of a UX developer is to develop the practices, workflow, thinking, and culture required of effective user-experience design in an organization.
If that indeed was the result of my tenure as the Lead of UX Development, then my transition was less a pivot and more of an evolution. I developed the organizationâs UXD until it had its own inertia, when I could focus my attention on something else.
I remind myself that, like weâve been saying here, the UX is a metric. As such, user-experience design is the cumulative effort of the organization. You and I are in the business of user experience - because the user experience is often the chief differentiator. Price design is user experience design. Customer service design is user experience design. Content strategy is user experience design. Engineering is user experience design.
Jared Spool often tweets something along the lines of âwe are all UXers.â I roll my eyes, but he ainât wrong.
Sensemaking
When Sharif Shameem tweeted that hey just build a React app by describing it to a language model called GPT-3, some non-trivial number of web developers saw their lives flash before their eyes. Itâs cool, but an important lesson we take from it is that we have selection bias toward good examples.
The quaranphenomena called doomscrolling is fascinating. It describes scrolling through news or social media feeds seeing nothing but bad-news after bad-news, and both the danger of that vicious cycle and the difficulty to escape from it are drawing a lot of attention. Weirdly, it makes me think of this thing Rebekah Monson and I have been throwing around about some rough formula for giving users cookies đȘ after a certain number of interactions.
Itâs about deliberately intervening in user grind â when your user is participating in some unpleasant process, like the filling-out of long forms, or writing an obituary â by providing encouragement (or, cookies!) to make the interaction cost bearable.
I wonder how we might detect doomscrolling and make that doom more bearable.
Perhaps we call it âSamwising.â
Linguistic relativity is fascinating when you imagine how it might impact the reception of a service, like how the shape of the lens determines whatâs perceived.
Metric
Your first-contact resolution rate measures how many questions, concerns, or requests are resolved with only a single exchange between you and your user. Can you meet someone at their point of need â on a call, over email, or in a chat â just once and still fulfill that need?
This is the
# incidents resolved at 1st contact / total # of incidents
And thatâs it! What a ride.
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I write about design and philosophy in another newsletter called Stoic Designer. Read âLetter 76: Shirking Routine,â then subscribe.