Interview with Responsive Design Expert Sara Wachter-Boettcher

This week we sat down with Sara to pick her brain about Responsive Design tactics. Here’s what she had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You came from a background in writing and editing. How does that experience apply to the content strategy consulting you do today, and what other skills did you have to learn?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Working in journalism, copywriting, and then web writing, I learned a lot about how to tell stories, set pacing—whether for a quick headline or a slowly unfolding feature—and communicate ideas. I learned to be consistent, yet lively. I learned how to adjust my communication style for my audience.

These are all skills I bring to content strategy work, but content strategy includes much more than just writing and editing, or even planning for writing and editing. It’s about having a clear sense of organizational goals, and defining how content is going to support them: What role will content play in achieving your vision? This takes a whole set of new skills, from interviewing stakeholders and helping them articulate big-picture ideals to identifying workflow problems to facilitating collaboration across groups that haven’t historically gotten along to understanding the systems that support content, like CMSes.

RM: What are some of the challenges you see organizations facing as they go about dealing with content?

SWB: Right now, mobile is such a tremendous challenge for organizations—and not just technically. Trying to make their existing content—which they often have a lot of—mobile-ready and accessible is a massive undertaking. And it’s not just because it’s hard work to clean up existing content and break it down into modular parts. It’s because doing so also means changing how the organization functions. So many of our content problems are really, at their core, organizational issues: departments that don’t talk to one another; leadership that can’t get the staff excited—and invested in—a vision; people creating content for their internal department, rather than for their audience.

You can’t just have people operating in silos creating “their” pages of content; you need people working together across disciplines to see their content as a system of interconnected assets—and that’s a big shift for both content creators and organizational structures.

In fact, the more I’ve worked on content strategy—and specifically on helping organizations adapt for mobile—the more I have come to realize that not only can I not just write all my clients’ content for them, I also can’t just make models and deliver “deliverables.” Instead, I need to spend the bulk of my time negotiating the people problems and political headaches that surround the content. That’s how content becomes sustainable in the long term.

RM:So what are some of the most common misconceptions about mobile content?

SWB: I think the biggest one is still the idea that “No one would want to do that on their phone!” I hear it all the time as an excuse to remove content from a mobile site. It’s often tied to this notion that mobile users are “on the go”—that they only want quick information or are only performing certain tasks. Sure, some mobile users are rushing out the door or performing a quick task while waiting in line, but many studies have shown that people are using mobile devices all over the place: sitting on the couch, from bed, at work, everywhere. Google’s research even shows that more people browse the web on a smartphone from home than anywhere else.

So while you might re-prioritize content if you have actual data that shows mobile users are more likely to want specific things on a mobile device, it’s a huge problem to assume they will never want—and to remove access to—some content based on the device they’re using. As Karen McGrane says, “you don’t get to decide which device they use to access your content. They do.” People are going to use any device that is available to them to do anything they need to do. Why do we want to make choices for them?

RM: It sounds like organizations have a lot of work to do, then. Where should they start?

SWB: The key is to work toward baseline accessibility of content regardless of device, and that starts with revisiting all those legacy assets and cleaning out the gunk. Do you really need 10,000 pages of content? Why? For whom? Does that content need to be so long, or is it full of fluff and repetition? Asking these questions can help you pare all your content down to just what matters most—on mobile or anywhere else. From there, it’s a lot easier to start looking at improving the experience of content in different contexts by adding structure: breaking it into its constituent pieces and parts so it can be reformatted, reused, and reshaped to fit different displays.

RM: Thanks, Sara!

There’s still time to get the Early Bird Discount for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May 1 in NYC! Join Sara along with Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson for a three-day intensive course that’s interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

Interview with Responsive Design Expert Jason CranfordTeague

Our new Responsive Design Studio is just around the corner! Join us in NYC, April 29-May 1, for three days with three multi-disciplinary experts: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson. Each will be on hand for all three days; capped at 50 participants, that’s a 17:1 student:teacher ratio!

This week we had a chance to ask Jason to share some wisdom on Responsive Design from his perspective as a visual designer. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: As a designer, how do you convince your clients to get on board with Responsive Design?

Jason CranfordTeague: I get this question from a lot of designers: they would love to be using Responsive Web Design (RWD) techniques in their projects, but their clients and managers don’t understand what the benefits are. This is especially true when weighted against the extra effort it requires. Before you can even start planning to include RWD in a project, you need to get buy in from clients and from co-workers. The good news is once you show the upward trend of mobile devices and and lay out how RWD allows you to target not only the devices, but the context those devices are likely to be used in, most clients and team members quickly come around. In fact, the most common response I get is “why wouldn’t we do it that way?”

RM: What are some of the pitfalls designers encounter with creating responsive web designs?

JCT: The biggest downside to working with RWD is during the planning stage, where you have to consider your content and design, not just from the perspective of someone sitting at a computer screen or a laptop, but of someone sitting in a coffee shop using a tablet or walking busy streets using a smart-phone. Web designers are used to creating static wireframes and visual comps, and struggle when it comes to having to produce these for multiple-screens. One of the techniques I help my students understand is how using recently developed prototyping tools makes it so much easier to plan their designs for all three major contexts dynamically.

RM: How can RWD be used to help tailor an interface for context

JCT: If content is king, then context is queen. But for a long time, web interface designers have been able to get away with assuming their audiences are all in the same context: sitting at a desk. This is no longer the case as mobile devices allow users to untether themselves. RWD cannot tell you exactly where and how a user may be interacting with your designs, but by detecting the device capabilities, we can make some educated guesses that will inform our use cases for presentation and functionality.

RM: What is the most common mistake you see being made with RWD?

JCT: I see designs all the time where the tablet or smart-phone versions are just “mini-me” iterations of the computer screen version. One size does not fit all, and the layout that works for one screen and orientation does not always work on others screens or orientations. Navigation patterns, layouts, interactions, and even functionality will need to shift or change entirely as the design shifts between different contexts.

RM: What’s the coolest thing you can do with RWD that most people haven’t heard about?

JCT: That would have to be Webfont iconography. Web fonts have come on strong the last several years, exploding the typographic possibilities for web designs. But what a lot of designers and developers do not realize is that web fonts can be used to create easily styleable and infinitely resizable icons. Since fonts are vector in nature, you can create dingbat font files with your needed icons, and then size them for the context without resorting to multiple images and without loss of image quality.

RM: Thanks Jason!

There’s still time to get the Early Bird Discount for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May1 in NYC! Join Jason along with Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Aaron Gustafson for a three-day intensive course that’s interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

An Interview with Service Design authors Andy Polaine and Lavrans Løvlie

We’re thrilled to report that Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, went on sale just moments ago! Written by service design educator Andy Polaine, and Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason – both founding partners at live | work, Service Design is very much a practical book. But it also provides a Big Picture of service design, putting this emerging and increasingly critical field in perspective for designers of all stripes.

We got the chance to sit down and ask Andy and Lavrans to give us some insider tips on their experience in the field of Service Design. Here’s what they had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: What are a few things you’d wished you’d known before you got into the field?

Andy Polaine: I wish I knew more about the way MBAs think in order to be able to relate what we do to management in a language they are used to working with. I wish I had known more about working with qualitative field research, particularly the results and how to make sense of them. Synthesis is something that most people learn on the fly, but it’s an essential skill.

RM: So, we need to be better at “MBA-speak”?

AP: Well, designers of all flavors are often loud about championing the user/customer and we focus all our empathy big guns on them. But we’re pretty awful about turning that lens back on our clients and understanding what their issues, beliefs and motivations are. It’s easy to bang on about human-centered design if you’re not the one having to explain why you spent money on it to a board or shareholders who live their lives in spreadsheets.

RM: Could you point out some common mistakes in Service Design so we can avoid them?

AP: Don’t get caught at either end of the telescope. It’s easy to get totally bound up in the details of one particular touchpoint, especially if it has some kind of sexy, new technology attached to it and forget the simple stuff and the overview of how participants in the service move through the entire service ecosystem. At the same time, it’s easy to get caught up in a great, big concept idea and ignore the fact that the details make all the difference.

RM: How about a Service Design horror story?

AP: I once killed someone with a Post-It note. No, not really. But, due to a cancellation and a switch of interviewees, I once ended up interviewing a bunch of lawyers at an oil exploration company about their views on hydrogen fuel cell cars and future transport trends. Naturally, they were a little hostile to the idea. In any case, they refused to sign any release forms, would not let me record anything and refused the interviewee fee (who would have thought lawyers would turn down money?). I insisted I make notes, at least, but had to wrap it up pretty swiftly. This was in 2007 and the place was decked out like an office in Dallas from the 80s.

Lavrans Løvlie: The label was born in the 90’s in academia in Europe, mostly connected to sustainable product design. As far as we know we were the first company in the world to turn it into a commercial proposition. During the early 00’s London was a hub for new design thinking, and benefited from a perfect storm of young designers eager to challenge the industry, a political climate that funded research projects via the UK design council, and customers that were eager to push the boundaries of using design to drive innovation.

During those years we worked systematically to collaborate with other design companies to build a market, define a shared set of language and methods in the industry, publish, teach and research with academic institutions, and to educate the market. By the second half of the 00’s the core thinking of the field was relatively solid, and we have seen hundreds of companies develop Service Design propositions, and clients across the globe put the thinking into practice

RM: So, why do services need design?

LL: Because design serves society, and our biggest challenges in the developed world isn’t any more about satisfying material needs through products. Over the last century have gone from seeking a better standard of living to seeking better quality of life. In simple terms, the world does not need new chairs, but we need banks that work for citizens, health services that provide better for people, transport solutions that don’t threaten the environment, public services that truly serve citizens needs and communication services that enable us to keep in touch with people we care about. All the great challenges in our developed world is in the service space – and new solutions need design to keep the human at the heart of development.

RM: We’ll ask you what we asked Andy: What are some common mistakes in Service Design?

LL: The reason many Service Design projects fail to reach the real world of the market is that designers struggle to understand how difficult it is to implement change. Services cross channels, and impact not only on customers, but on technology, staff, organization, culture, and processes. In short, they affect organizations in broad and complex ways. A humble approach to the challenges that clients face in making concepts real is needed in order to help them reach people with new services.

RM: Thanks guys!

Again, the book is on sale March 13 – today! You can also win an ebook version thanks to a contest sponsored by our friends at Readmill – just follow them at @Readmill. Finally, Andy, Ben and Lavrans will present a free webcast on Service Design through our partner, O’Reilly Media, tomorrow (March 14)!

Two new UX events for spring 2013

p>While we’ve been hosting UX workshops for years, we’ll doing something different in 2013—we’re experimenting with some exciting new formats for educating UX professionals.

First up is a very deep dive into a critical topic—our first Responsive Design Studio, which takes place in New York City, April 29-May 1. This three-day course is literally interdisciplinary by design, conceived and taught by a dream team of authors: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, content strategist and author of Content Everywhere, Jason Cranford Teague, designer and author of CSS3 Visual Quickstart Guide, and Aaron Gustafson, developer and author of Adaptive Web Design. Each will lead a day and be on hand to “interpret” the other days. If you need to get up to speed on responsive design, this is the course for you—even more so for your team. The early bird deadline is March 30, so please register soon!

Next up is May 29, and the location is your office (or living room or yacht): 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips, a one-day virtual event co-hosted with our friends at Environments for Humans. We grabbed six incredible experts: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Whitney Quesenbery, and Jeffrey Eisenberg, and asked them to provide some awesomely practical advice. They came up with 31 in all, and each nugget will directly improve your user experience practice. Tickets are available for both individuals and teams; hope you’ll spend the day with us.

We’re working on putting together some other new workshops,a and we might be taking the Responsive Design Studio on the road later this year. Best way to keep up with our plans is to follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our free newsletter, the Rosenfeld Review. Thanks!

Good News, Bad News

Okay…the bad news first:

We recently had a fresh batch of Web Form Design paperbacks printed up and shipped to our distribution centers in three countries. After which we noticed, to our deep dismay, an odd printing defect: the title and author name were somehow omitted from the book’s spine.

Woof.

The good news is that a new, more-carefully QA’d batch is now being printed. And if you have one of those books with the mysterious spine, here’s what you can do:

1. Email us ([email protected]) a photo of the defective spine
2. Let us know if you’d like us to mail you a new copy (please include a shipping address); or let us know if you’d like the ebook versions of another of our titles.

We recommend you go for the ebook version of another title. Obviously, we want you to read more of our titles, but really, we’re looking out for you. We’re convinced that the defective spine version of Web Form Design will be worth as much as this some day:

Readmill + your iPhone + our books

Ever since those “Send to Readmill” buttons appeared on our site, we’ve been getting lots of thank yous from our customers.

Now that Readmill has launched its iPhone app—this morning—as in just a few minutes ago!—we expect even more. After all, your iPad is handy, but your iPhone is handier—so now you’ll be able to squeeze in some reading where iPads fear to tread. And Readmill’s position syncing means you can read our books across devices without losing your place.

With all the great features Readmill provides, our printer must be sweating profusely…

Grab the new Readmill for iPhone app and enjoy!

15 Questions with Steve Portigal – Rosenfeld Media

3. Three words that describe your childhood?
Kenobi. Simmons. Cheech.

4. Three things you never leave home without?
Wallet, keys, and an appetite (for destruction, of course).

5. What’s the best designed product you’ve ever used?
Timbits®—Bite-sized morsels of traditional donuts. 

6. What’s the story behind how you got into user research?
I was working at a design agency that was tentatively experimenting with a new service offering—insights that were “left of the idea” (yes, that was actually how they tried to market generative research work). My putative boss literally stopped speaking to me, and wasn’t putting me on projects (the sort of thing that generally requires talking), so the team doing this research work took me in. In the beginning, they had me watch videos and make notes. Then they let me go into the field and hold the video camera. Eventually I got to ask one or two questions, and as time wore on, I began to lead interviews and then plan and manage research. During that time period Don Norman (or was it Don Knotts?) appeared before me in a dream, clad in diaphanous robes. He marked me with the Sigil of Lamneth and bid me sternly to pursue this holiest of professions. That sealed the deal for me.

7. What other profession would you like to try if you could?
I’m fascinated by the television writer’s room. I haven’t come across any depictions of it that make it sound pleasant, but the collaborative creativity is fairly seductive. Otherwise, something about tending to the emotional needs of bugs.

9. What’s the most surprising thing that’s happened to you in the field?
Surprises are mostly internal moments, where I uncover a stub of my own judgment. As an example, I interviewed a man who was the head of an agency that shared his name. He was in his mid-60s with a head of white hair. I was steering the interview towards his past accomplishments, but he was so much more focused on his current goals. I realized I’d created my own narrative for this guy based on his age and that was completely inaccurate. So the surprise wasn’t about the fact that he was engaged and forward-looking. It was about the gap between my unspoken assumptions and the truth that unspooled before me. Honestly, the revealing of and subsequent dismantling of my assumptions is the most pleasurable part of doing fieldwork.

10. What’s the most heartwarming thing that’s happened to you in the field?
I tell this story in detail in my previous book, Interviewing Users. It involves a home interview where the participants were two young men still living at home, who hadn’t told their parents we were showing up for breakfast. But they wouldn’t speak in words and unwilling to talk with us. The parents were unsurprisingly hostile about our presence. Sitting in their kitchen, the mother (who we eventually pivoted to for the interview) told us that few people are welcomed into their house and that food is a carrier of meaning for their family and is not for strangers. We managed to have an incredible interview with her and her husband, after navigating extreme awkwardness and ambiguous permissions. When wrapping up, she told us, “No one comes here and doesn’t get food,” and made us some fried bread, fresh and hot. Given the horrible start, success was likely going to be not failing, at best. But instead, we ended up receiving her kindness and appreciation.

11. Tell us something people don’t know about the making of this book.
“Steve Portigal” is the pseudonym for an anonymous collective of heartists, Burning Man exonerees, and professional home stagers. 

12. Which stories in the book did you personally learn the most from?
Oh, come on. I love all my children equally! The value of any story is most revealed when it’s considered in the aggregate. I learned from the process of analyzing and synthesizing the stories in order to create the book.

13. If someone is feeling burnt out on research, what story would you recommend they read from your book as a pick-me-up?
If you’re really burnt out on research, maybe go read about someone hiking the Pacific Crest Trail? If you aren’t quite at that stage, then maybe Susan Simon Daniels’ story “A Sigh Is Just a Sigh” which is touching as hell, or Jenn Downs’ hilarious (and slightly Bombeckian) “Burns, Bandages, and BBQ.”

14. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger researcher self?
Don’t worry…someday there will be more researchers than you can imagine…and the demand for researchers will be more than that community can provide.

15. When you’re 90 and look back on your life, what would you like to be able to say to yourself?
“I still remember eating the last panda. Gosh, that was tasty!”

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting. He’s written two books on user research:  Interviewing Users and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. His work has informed the development of music gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. Follow Steve on Twitter or listen to his podcast Dollars to Donuts.

We’re hiring a Marketing Manager

Certainly, this is exciting news for us; maybe for you too?

This is a new position, with flexible hours. We expect it to eventually grow into a full-time gig. And you’d get to help define it as the job—and the company—change.

We don’t post job openings every day, so I’m sure we’ve forgotten to include something. Feel free to post questions below in the comments section. Or… go ahead and apply. We’d love a cover letter and a resume by Friday, January 4. Thanks!

Position Opening: Marketing Manager at Rosenfeld Media

The Job

Rosenfeld Media is the premier provider of books, training, consulting, and other expertise-based services to the growing community of user experience design professionals. We are a small company, but our brand is well-known and respected in the user experience (UX) community, and many of the UX field’s leading lights write our books, consult for our clients, and teach our courses. We seek a strong communicator to help us broaden our visibility and deepen our engagement within that community.

This is a half-time position (20 hours/week) with flexible hours; as our company grows, we expect it to become a full-time position. Because this is a new position, and the company and its market are changing, the person we hire will have a great opportunity to help define the position itself.

The position’s initial responsibilities include:

• Helping develop and execute our regular promotional activities (for example, creating and posting newsletters, blog postings, tweets, and book contests)
• Developing new, engaging ways to promote our people, products, and services
• Working with partners (e.g., sponsors, magazines, and conferences) to develop and carry-out joint promotions

The Approach

We use the term “marketing” loosely. While we value, respect, and—when appropriate—utilize traditional marketing approaches and methods, our brand’s success is built on conversation and curation. Conversation means listening to and engaging with our community, and curation means providing uniquely valuable content to the community. The Marketing Manager will continue to intensify our ongoing efforts to communicate with and curate for our community.

Skills and Experience

The candidate:

• Is a strong communicator who can listen, talk, and write in a compelling way
• Can work independently and remotely, tackling discrete projects while managing ongoing tasks
• Has a flexible schedule
• Generates and tries new ideas, makes and admits mistakes, and learns from them
• Can demonstrate relevant success in past positions

The ideal candidate:

• Is familiar with (or has demonstrated curiosity in) the field of user experience design
• Has experience marketing and promoting expertise-based products and services (e.g., books, training, and/or consulting)
• Has experience with at least some marketing and social media tools (currently, we rely upon MovableType, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Twitter, and Hootsuite)
• Yet knows that tool use is only one of many means to achieving success
• Has a bachelor’s degree in communications, marketing, or a related field
• Is located in the New York City metropolitan area

How to Apply

Please submit your resume and a cover letter using our form by January 4, 2013.

2 New Books at 20% off!

12/12/12 is an auspicious day for us, as two new Rosenfeld Media books make their debut. And that they’re so dramatically different speaks to UX’s growing diversity.

Kevin Cheng’s (very) long-awaited See What I Mean shows designers and researchers of any stripe how to communicate using comics—regardless of artistic ability. (Check Brad Colbow’s Amazon review.) And Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Content Everywhere unravels the complexity around breaking down and restructuring content so it can work in today’s multi-device world. (Check out what Jason Grigsby says about the book.)

Pretty different, eh? But we think you’ll find both books incredibly useful. Please celebrate that diversity by picking up both titles at 20% off—put them both in your shopping cart, and the discount will be applied automatically (good through 12/31/12). Not a bad holiday gift for your UX team, or yourself…

While we’ve got your attention, we wanted to show off a bit. We’ve always been proud of the wonderful covers that The Heads of State creates for us. But our book interiors are catching up. Just check out the first page of Kevin’s book:

…and enjoy one of the many lovely illustrations that Eva-Lotta Lamm created for Content Everywhere:

We hope you enjoy them both!

Why we’ve been so quiet

Normally, we here at Rosenfeld Media work really hard to engage with the user experience community. If you follow our Twitter account, you know that’s where we curate useful tweets from over 60 Rosenfeld Media authors and experts (and yes, we advertise our own books, workshops, and expertise there too). We usually post announcements here on our site from time to time, and put out a newsletter every month or two.

But for the past weeks, we’ve been mostly silent. Like a lot of New York City-based companies, Hurricane Sandy has been very hard on us. Us, by the way, is two people—you might be surprised to learn that Rosenfeld Media has only two full-time employees. One of us lives in Brooklyn’s devastated Red Hook neighborhood, which still has no power. (The other was fortunate to be away during the hurricane.) Needless to say, we’re operating at the bare minimum, making sure that the essentials get done: book order fulfillment, new book production, and taking care of workshop logistics.

So you won’t hear much from us for a few more days at least, but we’re still here. We will move forward with the two remaining stops in our fall UX workshop series (Minnneapolis November 12-14, and Toronto November 28-30). We do have two excellent books at the printer right now—Kevin Cheng’s See What I Mean and Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Content Everywhere (you can get them and our next two books at a very nice discount). And lots of other good things are cooking that we’re looking forward to sharing with you once things get back to normal—or normal-er, at least.

In the meantime, please consider helping or contributing to any or all of these great causes—they’re making a big difference for those affected by Sandy, and you can too:

• Brooklyn Recovery Fund
• Hands Across the Boroughs
• Occupy Sandy Recover
• Power Rockaways Resilience
• Red Hook Initiative
• Red Hook NYC Recovers

Thank you!