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.

An Editorial Shift and an Industry Transformation

Lean User Research for Product Development. That’s the title of our newly signed book. It’ll be written by the brilliant Tomer Sharon, a researcher at Google, and will come out in 2015.

The first part of the title seems to sound like what you’d expect from Rosenfeld Media. But “product development”? What about UX? Have we lost our way here at Rosenfeld Media world headquarters?

Well, things are getting interesting out there. Like you, we’re noting an interesting shift in the industry. Designers and researchers are finding themselves in closer quarters with product managers, startup founders, and business leaders. In fact, more and more they’re the same people.

Tomer’s book—but also Victor Lombardi’s Why We Fail and forthcoming titles like Indi Young’s Practical Empathy, Dave Gray’s Principles of Agility, and Lisa Welchman’s Managing Chaos—clearly and directly acknowledge this transformation.

As the UX industry changes all industry, we’ll be there with you. We’ll continue to publish short, practical books that help you with the nuts and bolts of UX practice. But we’ll also be there with you as you grind out your service’s P&L, build out your team, make your products come to life, and change how business is done globally. Yes, that sounds grandiose, but it’s already happening. We plan to help.

The design of survey forms at GOR 2014

Where does a form end and a survey begin? That was my challenge when I was invited to lead a half-day workshop on forms design at the General Online Research conference 2014 in Cologne, Germany.

The group included survey methodologists from government, health topics, market research, and independent consultants.

We had a lively discussion as we shared examples of:

• forms that introduce surveys,
• aspects of questionnaires that are similar to forms, and
• forms that survey methodologists use to keep track of survey data.

View the slides from the workshop:  Survey forms GOR14 by @cjforms from Caroline Jarrett

32 UX tips + sponsors’ freebies = :-)

Not only do we have 32 Awesomely Practical UX Tips to share with you this April 24, but we have 5 Awesomely Supportive Sponsors: MailChimp, UserTesting.com, UIE, O’Reilly, and Balsamiq.

• UserTesting.com: They provide an incredible user testing service that generates user research—from real people—IN ONE HOUR. And analysis too. Even better—they’re providing a free test to first twenty people who register for our event.
• User Interface Engineering: UIE recently launched their All You Can Learn library , which features recorded virtual seminars from the industry’s best instructors. When you register for our event, you’ll get two months’ free access to 119 UIE virtual seminar recordings.
• O’Reilly: Our long-time partners and source of inspiration, O’Reilly is providing each registrant with a free e-book.
• MailChimp: UX in action: a fantastic newsletter management platform that provides an exemplary user experience, and backed by one of the best user experience teams in the biz. In fact, that team puts out its own newsletter, which is required reading for UXers.
• Balsamiq: There really is a better way to wireframe: Balsamiq Mockups. It reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard, but using a computer.

Those are some great freebies to go along with the incredible value of our 32 Awesomely Practical UX Tips event with Brenda Laurel, Steve Portigal, Kim Goodwin, Leah Buley, Christina Wodtke, and Dave Gray. You can attend it live on April 24, then enjoy the recordings at your leisure. We hope you’ll join us!

UX Bookmobile on Parade

Your friendly neighborhood UX Bookmobile is hitting the road, visiting Amsterdam for Interaction (February 5-8), and San Diego for the Information Architecture Summit (March ). Please stop by and say hello, thumb through our paperbacks, and buy them (ebooks as well) at a deep discount. (And no shipping to boot!)

By the way, the UX Bookmobile happens to be perhaps the world’s cheapest, hokiest, and all-time GREATEST USER RESEARCH PLATFORM. There, the secret is now officially out.

DAISY format now available for all Rosenfeld titles

One way to get your arms around accessible design is to read a certain new book. Another is to work directly with the book’s authors. Thanks to Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery’s help (and gentle pressure), we now offer all Rosenfeld Media books in DAISY format.

What’s DAISY? It’s the digital talking book standard. DAISY is a way of formatting books so they can be read and navigated more easily by people who are blind, have low vision, or have learning disabilities.

DAISY books work on standalone devices or with reading software such as Kurzweil. People can listen to the book, read the book with enlarged print, or convert the text to Braille. Some DAISY reading tools provide advanced options to navigate the book, as well as support additional tasks like inserting notes and looking up definitions.

DAISY isn’t just available for Sarah and Whitney’s A Web for Everyone; as of now, you can log in to your Rosenfeld Media account and download all of your past purchases in DAISY format. 🙂