The People Project

I’ve always been impressed by people and organizations that value transparency. And I’ve tried to make it a cornerstone of how Rosenfeld Media does business.

As a brand attribute, transparency sounds great. But as a way for a company to behave, it’s much more complicated, and even a little painful. It means publicly admitting when stuff goes wrong, and occasionally acknowledging your own ignorance or impotence.

Allow me to be painfully transparent: given the field we’re in, you’d expect Rosenfeld Media to be a completely user research-driven company.

And you’d be wrong.

Like many small companies?—?and even some large ones?—?we’ve made the same excuses that we begrudge our consulting clients: not enough time, staff, or budget.

Well, it’s time to call bullshit. No more excuses.

So we’re starting a new thing called The People Project. It’s a lean user research program that makes sense for a tiny company like ours. And we’ll report on it— transparently—right here on our site. That way you’ll see?—?and hopefully learn from?—?what we’re discovering.

We’re centering our research on the actionable questions?—?some big, some small?—?that directly address what people need and want most from us. We’re leaning on our roster of Rosenfeld Media UX experts to guide us when we get stumped answering these questions along the way.

And we’re emphasizing practical tools and iterative approaches over grand methods. After all, we’re in the business of UX expertise, not medical devices or Martian rovers.

I’m so excited that Rosenfeld Media is finally becoming truly user research-driven—and a little relieved. It’ll be hard, but the hardest part is, as they say, recognizing that you have a problem. Nice to check that off the list. Of course, we’re certainly not the first organization to share our user research. In fact, our biggest inspiration is the amazing UX team at MailChimp; you should really subscribe to their newsletter to see what they’re learning.

I’m especially proud of Elaine Matthias and Stephanie Zhong for pushing this forward; you’ll be hearing directly from them along the way.

Speaking of which, we’ll be posting what we learn right here. We’ll also tweet about what we’ve learned via @rosenfeldmedia.

If you’re finding this interesting or even inspiring, let us know by commenting below. In fact, if your small organization is doing something similar, would you mind sharing a bit about what you’ve learned?

We’re hiring: Content Marketer/Community Manager

Got what it takes to be the voice of Rosenfeld Media? Then we’d like to hear from you. Have a look at the job posting; we’ll need your pitch by July 10.

Peak empathy? No, Practical Empathy!

Given that Indi Young and I first began discussing her new book idea many, many years ago, Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work was a marathon in the making. Even the last mile proved to be full of unexpected (and unpleasant) challenges.

So I’m thrilled (and relieved) that, as of today, Practical Empathy is finally available! And not just in paperback; like all of our books, it’s also available in DRM-free PDF, MOBI, and ePUB formats. Learn more at the book’s site, where you can sample the table of contents, illustrations, FAQ, and read testimonials like this one from Karen McGrane:

Your product design should be informed by a deep understanding of user goals. In Practical Empathy, Indi outlines a way of working that goes beyond data-driven research methods to deliver genuine empathy for the people who use the things we make.

By the way, I know what you’re thinking: everyone’s talking about “empathy” lately. Are we at the point of having reached peak empathy? The answer really depends on what we mean by the word.

And Indi’s take on empathy is quite different than what you might assume:

This book is not about the kind of empathy where you feel the same emotions as another person. It’s about understanding how another person thinks—what’s going on inside her head and heart. And most importantly, it’s about acknowledging her reasoning and emotions as valid, even if they differ from your own understanding. This acknowledgment has all sorts of practical applications, especially in your work. This book explores using empathy in your work, both in the way you make things and the way you interact with people.

Yes, we all could stand to be more empathetic in the ways we feel about others. But Indi’s book focuses on cognitive empathy, which offers a huge and hugely practical payoff to anyone involved in just about any aspect of design. We hope you’ll enjoy the payoff from reading from Practical Empathy.

Interview with UX Expert Aarron Walter

We’re so excited that Aarron Walter will be sharing his UX wisdom at our upcoming event, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!

This week we pick Aarron’s brain about UX tactics and product strategy. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: In our community MailChimp is perceived as a leader in newsletter services, heads above its competitors. Is it you who made the difference?

Aarron Walters:Not by any stretch. We have a bunch of really creative, sharp folks in our teams that all make cool stuff. We’ve found that hiring is a really important process to get right. We take a long time to hire the right folks rather than just going after skills. We spend a lot of time “dating” candidates, having dinner, testing their pool chops, and bringing them into design critiques. We want to hire talent, but a social fit is just as important, especially for a company with a distinct personality brand.

RM: Does your team take the lead in developing MailChimp’s product strategy? Or does your team execute a strategy that’s already been developed by MailChimp’s leadership?

AW: My team—User Experience&#8212works on design research, UI design, and front-end build out of MailChimp and many of our other apps, but strategy is becoming a bigger part of what we do as well.

Last year we had a small data overload crisis. We were getting so much feedback from customers, the support team, and colleagues. Though the feedback was valuable, it was too much information to triage into tasks for teams. Instead of just tossing it out, we started to forward all of the feedback into an Evernote account in the event that we may want to revisit it at some point.

Our CEO sent me an email asking how our customers were using a feature we were thinking about rebuilding. I did a quick search in the Evernote notebook and quickly found about 45 very valuable pieces of feedback from customers on this topic, each with an email address attached making follow up easy. In about a day we were able to define a series of recommendations based off real use cases from customers.

That experience got us really excited about learning more from our data. Because you can email notes into Evernote, it’s easy to stream data in that you can then run searches on. We started feeding in Google Analytics reports, aggregate app usage data, all user interviews, usability test findings, industry research, account closing surveys and tons more. Now when we have a question, a quick search reveals industry trends, trends in our apps, and individual customers we can talk to for deeper understanding of an issue.

We call this approach Big Data UX. We’re not parsing petabytes of data, but we’re breaking down silos to get a very broad picture of things so we can shape a smart strategy.

RM: Do you see your team’s role in product strategy changing much over the next five years?

AW: As we stream in new data from other departments, we’ll be even better equipped to define strategy. The hardest part now is telling a concise, clear story of our findings so many teams can grok it in seconds. We’re experimenting with video and posters so a strategic plan can be IMed or understood while you make coffee.

RM: Thanks, Aarron!

There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Aarron along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.

Free book and 20% off our People Skills for UX conference

Great UX requires more than design and research chops—so we’ve put together a virtual conference to help you develop your listening, facilitation, negotiation, and leadership skills. People Skills for UX brings the collective wisdom of four UX “innies” and four “outsiders”—David Sibbet, Harry Max, Jennifer Pahlka, Julian Treasure, Kevin Hoffman, Kim Goodwin, Michelle Katz, and Steve Portigal—this May 27. And because it’s a virtual conference, you (and your team) can participate in your PJs.

Oh, and recordings are part of the deal.

Take 20% off with code PEOPLESKILLS. Do it by 11:59pm EDT this Friday (April 24) and we’ll send you a free copy of Victor Lombardi’s wonderful book Why We Fail.

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.