Welcome back. Chief experience officer posts are popping up at organizations from Under Armour to United Way, sometimes taking over responsibility for teams that previously reported to the CEO. This week we also take a look at how companies are emailing customers early and often during the coronavirus pandemic—sometimes creating an effect they did not intend. And startups are streamlining estate planning.

A growing group of companies are hoping that having a dedicated chief experience officer can improve results by making the most of every interaction between customers and employees. The role often sweeps together several previously separate functions, theoretically promoting teamwork but also risking resentment over lost independence.

Brooke Skinner Ricketts, the new CXO at Cars.com, said the teams that report to her sometimes have friction over where to put resources, but the shift had allowed them to better understand each other’s roles in the larger project.

“There’s been more than one occasion where the marketing team or product team reprioritized and said, ‘I’m going to put that landing page on the back burner because if we can invest in conversion here, we’re going to see more sustainable results for the business,’” Ms. Skinner Ricketts said.

“You have to dismantle the old process,” said United Way CEO Brian Gallagher, who reassigned his digital, fundraising and marketing teams to report to a new CXO instead of him. “You have to take leaders out of positions. You have to say this way of working is now gone.”

Businesses large and small have been sending emails to reassure customers during the coronavirus pandemic, promising clean counters in kitchens and hand sanitizer in stores. But there’s a fine line between keeping people in the know and adding to the noise.

“Corona has really made me realize.. how many corporate emails I need to unsubscribe from,” the singer Kacey Musgraves wrote on Twitter.

A lot of companies aren’t reading the room, said Lloyd Rang, CEO of Lloyd Rang Communications.

“You’re talking to an anxious audience,” he said. “And if you as a company are contributing to a bunch of emails that are flooding peoples’ inboxes, you have to ask yourself the question: Are you helping or not?”

Financial-services firms and tech startups are simplifying the process of getting wills, trusts and life insurance to make these tasks more palatable to young families, who tend to push estate planning to the bottom of their to-do lists.

The online platform Fabric, for example, helps people create a will and get life insurance without a medical exam, as long as they don’t have major health issues or dangerous hobbies.

Such efforts were growing even before the coronavirus limited millions of people’s movement and made mortality a more urgent concern for many.

But Fabric said it is on track to at least double the number of life-insurance policies sold this month versus February.

An app called Tomorrow, which offers similar services, said nearly three times as many people are signing up for its app per day as they were two weeks ago.

Burning Man said it is keeping safety in mind as it continues to plan for this year’s annual late-summer festival. [Designboom] 

A competition called Fountain of Hygiene is asking creatives to redesign hand sanitizer packaging. [It’s Nice That] 

The user experience of emergency management varies widely. [UX Collective]

Seven laws of UX design and what happens when you break them. [UX Planet]

Eight ways to manage a team during social distancing. [HBR] 

How user researchers can stay fresh, despite what can be repetitive work. [UXmatters]

Designer Ji Lee created a series of emoji fit for the coronavirus pandemic. [Fast Company]