As mentioned, we’re creating benchmarks for software funnel performance. The goal is to use it as part of roadmapping for new clients. I’d like to talk a little about how we plan on doing this, and how far we’ve already gotten on it.

I have a standing call with my friend Quinn. I met Quinn at a professional conference before the Bad Times™ began. We became friends, I started using their usability testing platform, we stayed friends. We chat every other month and I look forward to it every time. Lots of laughter. This time we talked about work stuff, of course, as we always do, but we also talked about other stuff. Quinn’s a maker, and she recently went to a conference that had a fun little workshop where you got to make a body scrub, which is comically easy to do, and take it home. Then we talked about how I make my own face mask with a 2:1 blend of bentonite clay & crappy matcha, and I mix with diluted apple cider vinegar. It also works for detoxing your armpits.

We have pruned the bonsai tree. In my conversations with close people about all of this, usually they ask what I’m working on right now, and I tell them that I’m unshipping a lot of the business. I think they expect creation, instead. We are all drawn to newness, to ascendance, to the future-forward. Lord knows I’ve been on the correct side of that one before, but all of this hits different, no?

Just wanted to let you know that it’s your last chance to get a couple of our books:

• Store Design (buy)
• Draft Evidence (buy)
• Or get a bundle of all four of our books.

I’ll take these offline first thing tomorrow morning, so if you want them you’ll need to act now.

Thanks, as always, for your support.

As part of our repositioning, we’ll be pausing a few more offerings. Towards this end, both memberships & text will conclude this week. For those of you who supported our paid work, we’re deeply grateful for you. If you got charged anytime after June 01, we’ll be refunding your payments.

We’ll continue writing letters every week, of course. In fact, we think our letters will be better going forward, since we’ll be able to put more effort into making each of them amazing.

We’re folding text’s subscribers into this list, and if you’re not interested you can always just part ways. No hard feelings!

Finally, Draft × Sonnenzimmer sales will conclude on Friday, July 17 at 5p CDT.

Most of your experiments happen on home or pricing. Some on signup. But you can go deeper. In this paid lesson, we’ll be talking about how to run A/B tests behind the login wall of your product.

As promised, we’ll be concluding our sales of Draft Evidence & Store Design shortly. We’ll accept orders of either book, including bundles, until 5p CDT on Thursday, July 02. At that point we’ll take both books off sale.

We stand by all of our work, of course, but this is a permanent decision. They aren’t coming back after then. We’ll continue to put effort towards supporting our other two works, Cadence & Slang & Value-Based Design.

Thanks for your ongoing support of us, and please let us know if you have any questions!

900 years ago, I worked for ad agencies around Chicago. They’d have a “UX” need and hire me to not research, do wireframes, and hand them off to the people who made it pretty. This sometimes worked, for some definition of “worked.”

I’m about to kick off a major project with a client that is turning a handful of interviews into a dashboard uncharitably, and analytics more broadly.

I have spent my whole career, even pre-Draft, circling the topic of data display like a curious leopard. Data should tell a story. Most of it, by default, does not.

Now that we’re sold through most of the year, it’s worth talking about what’s worked for us.

Building on our free letter, in this lesson we’re covering some of the more subtle, consultative aspects of critique. This has shifted over the past few years alongside new technological developments & the urgent necessity to restore design to a consultative position.

Announcement 1: Thanks to everyone for your interest in our open consulting slot. We are now sold through late October. Grateful, as always, for your support of value-based design.

For those of you who wish to increase your revenue in 2027, you may begin your application by replying to this email.

In a paid lesson from way, way back, I talked about how to pull heat & scroll maps every month and analyze how behavior changes over time. Sometimes it changes in response to the improvements you’re making; sometimes it changes alongside the behavioral characteristics of your addressable market. In either case, you should build these changes into a coherent narrative that explain what your customers are really doing.

Recent developments have made it much easier to start with this.

I was on a fun chat with a fellow consultant recently who does sales. I am unfond of doing sales. It’s nice talking to people who like doing sales, because we have a weirdly symbiotic relationship.

Every software business should ask their customers what drove them to join and how they can help. Post-signup surveys should be a part of onboarding, and they should be periodically analyzed for design improvements & product direction.

In this paid lesson, we’ll walk you through what & how.

I made a mistake recently. I was hanging out with my pal Quinn in Mexico and thanked her for referring a client to us recently. I said I hoped the box full of snacks I sent her was delicious.

“Box?”

I am, in some ways, the worst person to answer this question, since we contractually dictate tooling. However, since we have fluency in describing tooling, in knowing the systems that surround tooling, that may provide us with a perspective that could be valuable to you in the present moment.

It is every room talking exclusively of LLM. It is every podcast being about LLM. It is writing a reasonably well-read newsletter, and all of a sudden, single installment that is not about LLM ends up with half the open rate. It’s a lot of fear and anger and frustration in the face of a bunch of people who appear to have got the religion. It’s the biggest room of LLM-pilled people universally admitting that they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s a bunch of propaganda from a few companies that may not exist in five years. Business as usual, I guess.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about what we’re presently doing at Draft to synthesize design research. This is keeping in mind a few things:

• We only use locally-hosted, open-source models

• We check our work, since LLMs are still prone to making errors

• We don’t use LLMs to create final comps, instead using them in the first 80%-ish of design: research & synthesis

This has made our jobs a little easier. A little.

When I wrote last week’s letter, I didn’t mention LLM, because I didn’t have to. Then I went to a conference that I love dearly. I love it so much that, when the previous edition ended, I immediately bought a ticket for next year. Later, it pivoted entirely to discussing LLM during the day sessions.

This was a blessing in disguise. On the one hand, there is no way on earth that you will ever make me go to an all-LLM conference on purpose. On the other, I already know most of these people. I’ve even worked with some of them. So no matter what, I’ll be down for the hallway track. I know that won’t be entirely about LLM. I’ll find my people. I’ll also be able to take the temperature of the room. And I’ll do it all in the best food city in North America.

In another dimension, I would have come back throughly LLM-pilled, spending the rest of my life teaching you how to Claude up the joint. I know this will shock all of you, but that did not happen. I have been around the block long enough to both take new developments seriously and also know how to incorporate them into my practice. I literally stare at software like this for a living. I point out the failings of everything in a way that is infuriatingly correct, forever.

Those who’ve been around here for a while already know this, but: LLM is not the totality of your practice. In fact, it is not the practice of most people. Most people have just been handed a tool. Your job is not a tool. Your job has never been a tool.

What happens when someone generates a front-end comp for you and says this must be the way? Of course this hasn’t happened with any of our clients, since this is unallowable into the field. But we’ve noticed this happening in other organizations, and we read this post about the survivor of a toxic workplace recently, so we feel called to speak out.