Coming in 2016: Build Better Products by Laura Klein

What does it take to build incredible products? Many UXers have experienced the highs and lows of working hard on a product fueled by a great idea only to watch it fall short of users’ expectations at launch. This all-too-common story has sent UX people delving into the world of product management, and vice versa.

That’s why we’ve signed Laura Klein, author of O’Reilly’s UX for Lean Startups, to write Build Better Products (due out in 2016). Laura will take you step-by-step through the process of building products that people truly love to use.

Why we’re excited about this book:

• This might be the first product management handbook that pulls it all together for UXers and product managers alike.
• Laura will share expertise that comes from helping many Silicon Valley startups fine tune their product development processes.
• Laura is crazy funny and insightful—you’ll laugh while you learn practical methods for building products that live up to what users need and want.
• Not every company can afford to hire a coach like Laura. So we figured we’d bring Laura to you.

She’s pretty driven to write this book. Read why.

What do you most want to know about building better products? Let Laura know by commenting below…

Grab Your Seat: People Skills for UX Virtual Conference (May 27)

Are people getting in the way of the work you want to get done? No matter how talented a designer you are, if you can’t communicate or collaborate effectively with others, people can’t see the brilliance of your ideas.

Many of us (secretly) feel unprepared to deal with difficult bosses, colleagues and clients. And school didn’t teach us the skills we needed to influence people, lead teams, or resolve conflict. It turns out that “soft” skills are more important than we thought.

We’re thrilled to bring you a one-day virtual conference People Skills for UX this May 27 to take the stress out of working with people. Come boost your “soft” skills in four critical areas: leadership, listening, negotiation, and facilitation.

4 Reasons to Sign Up for People Skills for UX

• Gain strategies to help you be more influential at work
• Learn from a unique lineup of experts including:  a Hollywood insider, several TED speakers, and design leaders you know and respect
• Ask the experts the burning questions that are keeping you up at night
• No travel required—learn from the comfort of your desk—and get unlimited replays

The Expert Lineup

• Leadership: Kim Goodwin (VP of UX, PatientsLikeMe) & Jennifer Pahlka (Founder, Code for America)
• Listening: Steve Portigal (Portigal Consulting) & Julian Treasure (Founder, The Sound Agency)
• Negotiation: Harry Max (VP of Product, All Clear ID) & Michelle Katz (Former VP, Legal Universal Studios)
• Facilitation: Kevin Hoffman (Founder, Seven Heads Design) & David Sibbet (Founder, The Grove Consultants)

Reserve A Seat

You can purchase an individual ticket for yourself or buy a meeting room pass for your entire team or company.

See you there!

Now on sale: Lisa Welchman’s Managing Chaos

In design circles, it’s becoming as common to discuss organizational behavior as it is responsive design. This isn’t surprising; designers find their efforts continually crashing into walls of misaligned goals and, at times, vicious politics. And decision-makers are suffering too; if they can’t get their people and resources pointed in the same direction, their organizations can be damaged beyond repair.

So we’re glad to present our 23rd title, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design. It’s the “not a UX book” that UX people should read—as should their bosses. Because, as Peter Morville says, “You can’t get user experience right if your governance model is wrong.”

We’re also thrilled that were finally able to convince Lisa Welchman to write about her work. She’s been tackling governance issues for her entire career, and now is the perfect time for her book to debut, as designers care more about governance and decision-makers are grasping for ways to get better returns on their design investments.

As with all of our books, Managing Chaos is available in a loverly paperback and four DRM-free digital versions (PDF, MOBI, ePUB, and DAISY). Purchase it directly from us, or O’Reilly or Amazon.

A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

 

• We’ll make the ebook versions (PDF, ePub, and MOBI formats) downloadable from your account today. Unfortunately, this is a manual process, but your copy will be downloadable before the day is out.
• We’ll also email you a code to download another of our titles for free. It’s the least we can do.
• And we’ll let you know when we have an ETA for sending you the paperback.

In the meantime, I’m looking to move to Australia.

—Lou Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld Podcasts

I’ve wanted to do podcasts forever. Not because I like the sound of my own voice, but because I’m in the fortunate position of getting to talk to a LOT of brilliant, interesting people in the UX world—and, more and more, outside it. So often I’ve gotten off a call and wished I’d recorded it. Or heard a fantastic talk at a conference and wanted to delve deeper into the topic with the presenter.

Well, it’s nice to have this finally off the back-burner: the first two Rosenfeld Podcasts!

In the first podcast, “Designing for Villains,” I spoke with Eduardo Ortiz and Donna Lichaw. They participated in an amazing panel—called “Designing for Villains”, coincidentally, at last March’s IA Summit (along with David Bloxsom, Aviva Rosenstein, and Erik Gibb). Have a listen: after all, how often will you get to learn something about the porn industry that’s actually related to your work? (21 minute podcast)

In the second podcast, “Piaget, Lemony Snicket and Design for Kids,” I interviewed Brett Helquist and Deb Levin Gelman. You may know Deb—she wrote our newest title, Design for Kids: Digital Products for Playing and Learning. You may not know Brett, but you likely know his work—he’s an amazing illustrator of children’s books, best known for his work on the popular Lemony Snicket series. Deb and Brett shared some fantastic anecdotes and advice—from complementary perspectives—about designing and researching different age groups. (15 minute podcast)

These podcasts are very much experimental. For example, we know very little about editing (and it shows). I know very little about interviewing (and it shows). But practice makes, well, better. And, as Yoda would say, to get better at this we hope. Your feedback will help.

So thanks! And enjoy.

How to be a UX hometown hero

Here’s a cool idea: you’re just a phone call or two away from hosting a one-day UX mini-conference in your hometown.

It’s simple: find a local sponsor or two to cover the venue and the ticket for our next virtual event—UX Futures—and invite your local UX pals. Network, recruit, and learn—just like they’ve done in Detroit, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio. (Some simple instructions follow.)

If you bring UX Futures to your town, you’ll be rubbing virtual shoulders with an incredible lineup of UX stars: Steve Krug, Jesse James Garrett, Margot Bloomstein, Nathan Shedroff, Abby Covert, and Andy Polaine. This November 5, they’ll present six mind-expanding visions of the future of the field and the impact it will have on the world—and on us.

All you need to do is find the sponsors and get the word out to your community. Here’s how:

1. Find sponsors to provide a venue good for 50-100 attendees, projection, snacks, and the price of a group ticket (US$479).
2. Publicize to your network and charge (using Eventbrite or Meetup) a nominal fee (we suggest US$20 to cover snacks or maybe light meals) to attend.

Why do this?

It’s a fantastic way to bring people together for networking as well as learning in a way that goes beyond simple happy hours and other social activities. During breakfast, lunch, and the day’s breaks, your attendees will naturally meet and talk. And it’s also a great way to meet your next boss—or your next hire.

Why sponsor?

Aside from generating good will and aiding the local community, sponsors can invite staff and clients to participate and learn, and use the event as a recruiting opportunity. Given that sponsors often already have meeting space to provide—and you to help with getting the word out—it’s an inexpensive way to make a local impact.

Here’s how Rosenfeld Media will help

To make this even more attractive, we’d be glad to:

1. Mention and link to your local group and your sponsors on the event web site
2. Mention your group in our social media (with a combined reach of about 80,000)
3. Provide a full set of Rosenfeld Media’s UX digital books (currently 21 titles) to raffle off to a lucky attendee

Interested? Please let us know—we’d love to do what we can to bring this great UX event to your community.

See the future on November 5

Our next one-day virtual conference—UX Futures (November 5)—is a bit of a departure for us. Unlike our past events, which have focused on the awesomely practical, we’ll be taking a deep look at the UX that will be—for us as designers and as human beings.

You and your team will be inspired by six keynotes from an impressive, impressively interdisciplinary crew: Steve Krug, Jesse James Garrett, Abby Covert, Nathan Shedroff, Margot Bloomstein, and Andy Polaine. If there’s time, you’ll get your questions answered and, as always, the session recordings are included as part of the deal.

We’re glad to once again partner with our friends at Environments for Humans, and appreciate the generous support of sponsors UserTesting.com and TechSmith.

We hope you’ll join us for UX Futures this November 5!

Design for Kids… and everyone else

Today, Deb Gelman’s Design for Kids: Digital Products for Playing and Learning debuts. If you are in any way involved in researching and designing apps, sites, games or software for kids, Deb’s book belongs on your shelf.

But if you’re not, this book presents a golden opportunity to become a better designer or researcher by forcing you out of your comfort zone. Like such books as Luke Wroblewski‘s Mobile First and Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery’s A Web for Everyone, Design for Kids will help you become a better designer by guiding you through a design context that may be quite foreign.

Deb’s book starts with just enough theory to serve as a strong foundation for seeing the differences and similarities between kids and other audiences. Then Deb serves up an array of practical techniques, principles, and patterns, and a framework that you’ll find useful when designing for any audience.

Check out the book’s table of contents, its FAQ, a lovely foreword by Brenda Laurel, testimonials, and an excerpt in today’s A List Apart. Then pick up a copy directly from Rosenfeld Media in paperback or four DRM-free ebook formats. (Of course, it’s also available from Amazon.)

Now on sale: A Web for Everyone

650 million, or 10% of humanity. That’s the UN’s estimate about how many people have a disability of some kind. Yet many sites simply don’t work for these users.

That’s why we’ve just released A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. It will help you get your arms around an issue that may already be nagging away in the back of your mind. And you may be pleasantly surprised to find that design and accessibility aren’t a zero sum game.

Dana Chisnell puts it best: she says that A Web for Everyone “changes the discussion from how to meet accessibility requirements to thinking of accessibility as a driver for innovation and exellent user experience design.”

Have a gander at the table of contents, its FAQ, an excerpt, Aaron Gustafson’s foreword, and testimonials from Steve Krug, Karen McGrane, and other smart people. Then please consider picking up a copy—from us (your purchase will include 4 DRM-free formats: ePUB, MOBI, PDF, and DAISY), or from Amazon.

An unanswerable survey invitation

“Choose a single question and get it in front of some users” – that’s what I wrote myself in my aims for this book.

Evernote recently send me an email that corresponds to that advice. The single question was:

“How would you rate the support you received?”

And it’s made me revise my advice. Being a single question isn’t quite good enough. It’s got to be a good question – one that users:

• can understand,
• have an answer for,
• want to answer, and
• can provide their chosen answer.

My problem with Evernote’s question? Let’s run through those steps:

• Yes, I could understand it.
• Yes, I had an answer for them: “not bad, but I’m grumpy because a feature that I paid you for turns out not to exist and it took a series of emails to discover that”.
• Yes, I wanted to tell them that.
• But no: the email failed at the final step, a place for me to provide my answer.

It offered me two choices: “Bad, I’m unsatisfied” and “Good, I’m satisfied”. Neither works. The support agent wasn’t good: it took several emails for him to understand that I didn’t understand the lack of the feature. But he wasn’t bad either: we did get there in the end. And I’m both unsatisfied with the lack of the feature, and satisfied with other aspects of Evernote.

(Although I’m not exactly thrilled that they have addressed me by my name in lower case with a 3-digit number of their choice added to the end. That seems disrespectful).

So sorry, Evernote, no click from me. But thanks for the opportunity to think through one aspect of my book.