Now on sale: Playful Design by John Ferrara

It’s here! John Ferrara’s Playful Design: Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces is now on sale.

John’s book is not yet another title on gamification. Playful Design instead takes a healthily skeptical and highly practical approach to showing how user experience designers can achieve great things in the real world through games.

The book’s introduction, testimonials, and its 137 images are all available via the book’s web site. And the good people at .net magazine were kind enough to publish an excerpt. Check’em out, then order this lovely new book as a four-color sewn binding paperbacks and in three DRM-free ebook formats (PDF, ePUB, and MOBI).

(By the way: our long publishing drought is over—our authors suddenly seem to be getting super-productive!—and we may put out as many as eight new books in 2012. So this might be a good time to check out our Future Pack—our next four titles at 25% off).

New book signing! Lisa Welchman will be Managing Chaos

We’re thrilled that Lisa Welchman has begun work on a new Rosenfeld Media book, Managing Chaos: Web Governance for the Enterprise (due out later this year).

Lisa is doing us all a service by taking on the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. Regardless of how much we invest in UX research, design, technology, or content strategy, it’s all too likely these efforts will fall flat if web governance hasn’t been addressed. Why? Well, so many of our organizations are messy environments that are rife with political intrigue and outright turf warfare. But there’s hope: better web governance will make your web environment the agile, coordinated business channel it was meant to be. And there’s no better person to tackle this topic than Lisa, who’s been at it longer—and more successfully—than just about anyone on the planet.

Interested? Then sign up here and we’ll email you when Lisa’s book goes on sale (we’ll send you a code for a nice discount as well). And if you can’t wait for Lisa to finish her book, you really ought to attend her web governance workshop in Washington, DC, this May 9.

Two questions for Whitney Quesenbery on storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful tool, and thanks partly to a certain book, UX practitioners are using storytelling to supercharge both their research methods and designs. So we’re pleased that Whitney Quesenbery will teach Using Personas and Storytelling Effectively, one of our full-day UX workshops, in Washington DC on May 7.

RM: What’s the biggest mistake UX people make when it comes to storytelling?

Whitney Quesenbery: Many people take “storytelling” too literally, looking for a classic short story or other ways of “performing” a story. That’s one kind of storytelling, but there are many more. Like so many other UX concepts, there’s (big) Story—the idea of infusing context, characters, emotion, and imagery into our work—and there’s (little) story, all the ways we can do that, from personas to the narrative arc of an interaction.

RM: What’s one thing you wish you knew about storytelling before you started writing about it?

Whitney Quesenbery: I wish I knew more about ways to use story that aren’t as comfortable for me. That’s why the collaboration with Kevin Brooks was so great. His oral storytelling and use of stories in design innovation complement mine for understanding the user experience.

Since the book came out, I’ve talked about storytelling in UX with a lot of people around the world. It’s been awesome to keep learning from them and trying new ways to incorporate stories into my own work.

Three reasons why your response from your panels may not be what you want

What might turn an honest, happy respondent into a despondent cheat?

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Luke Wroblewski on the Most Common Web Form Mistake

Web Form Design remains our best-selling title, and it’s not surprising—Luke Wroblewski took a topic that sounds painfully dry and made it a joy to read. And powerful too: poorly-designed web forms can negate much of your site’s value, but Luke’s book is packed with straightforward and often easy fixes.

RM: What’s the biggest mistake people make when it comes to Web form design?

Luke Wroblewski: Focusing on the layout or technical implementation of Web forms instead of their role in a conversation with people. In most cases, it’s the questions we ask and how we ask them that make or break form conversion, not a fancy layout or technical solution. Yet many teams will spend months designing and developing new Web form designs that ultimately don’t move conversion. A lot of this effort is probably better spent taking an outside-in look at the requirements in your forms. That is, seeing things from your customer’s point of view—not yours.

You can even go so far as scripting or acting out what an ideal conversation with your customer might be. For example, if you are offering home loans, a useful conversation might go something like this:

“How can I help you?”
“I’m trying to see if I can afford a home.”
“I can help you with that, is this your first home purchase…”

Whereas, a typical Web form conversation goes more like this:

“First Name”
“Umm ok I guess”
“Last Name”
“Phone number”
“Wait why do you need my phone number?”
“Agree to my terms of service!”

Clearly there’s a big difference between these two approaches.

RM: Are users really willing to have conversations with us? Don’t they take some comfort in the anonymity of interacting with faceless organizations through forms?

Luke Wroblewski: They are if they want what’s on the other side of the form and the conversation is clearly helping them get it. No one’s going to take the time to hand over a bunch of information unless they have some reason for doing so. The key to turning the process of collecting that information into a conversation is understanding that motivation: they want to buy something, they want to get a rebate, whatever it happens to be. When you know why people are there you can ensure your questions align with their goals or explain situations where people may think your requirements don’t. Even better, you can align your visual and interaction design with those goals too.

But if you are asking if people want to have actual back and forth conversations with personified paper clips, the answer is probably no. Thinking in terms of a conversation doesn’t mean you literally design it that way (though you can and I’ll be discussing that in the workshop!). It means you’ve thought about your requirements & process in human terms. Not just in terms of databases, marketing requirements, and legal mandates.

RM: So what’s the second biggest mistake people make with Web form design?

Luke Wroblewski: I may have been too kind in my first answer because I assumed that an organization actually takes the time to think about and carefully design their forms. More often, though, forms are just a label/input field version of the name/value pairs in a database. Many people don’t realize how much you can do to improve critical interactions like checkout, registration, and so on. They simply assume “a form is a form” and that’s it. There’s a world of optimization, science, and art that can be applied to forms to great effect, which is what this workshop is all about—not only what’s possible but the details behind how to do it.

Hope to see some of you at my workshop!

Survey seminar: resources and slides

Thanks to everyone who attended my Virtual Seminar “Designing effective surveys” on 28th February 2012.

If you missed it, you can:

• purchase the recording from User Interface Engineering
• view the slides on SlideShare (or at the end of this post)

Resources that I mention in the seminar

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New book signing! Sara Wachter-Boettcher to take Content Everywhere

We all love a challenge.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is taking on a big one in Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content (due out later this year).

Her challenge is to show you how to break content down and reassemble it into parts that make sense in a multi-device, multi-channel world. From improving deep navigation to leveraging microformats to developing a more semantic web. Content Everywhere will help you develop content that’s findable, adaptable, connectable, transportable, and easier to manage.

Tackling this topic will be no problem for Sara; after all, it only happens to be the cutting edge of both content strategy and information architecture. 😉

Sign up here to be emailed when the book is available for purchase (we’ll also send you a nice discount code while we’re at it). And, of course, you can keep up with her progress at the book’s site.

Register for a workshop, get $350 Loop11 project!

There’s yet another awesome deal for attendees for our Spring 2012 UX Workshops!

When you register for our workshops you’ll receive a free project (with no limits on tasks and questions) from our sponsor, Loop11, to conduct your own online usability study (normally priced at $350).

Here are the details:

• You’ll get quantitative usability metrics based on hundreds of participants
• You’ll know whether your users can complete they key tasks they come to your website for
• You’ll find where there are usability problems with your website

What you’ll get with Loop11:

• One full scale project with no limit on the number tasks and questions
• Up to 1,000 participants

This offer is good when you register for any of our spring workshops: Mountain View (March 5-7), Washington DC (May 7-9), and New York (May 23-25).

Thanks, Loop11!

A Bundle of UX Goodness just for registering…

Register for one of Rosenfeld Media’s Fall 2012 UX Workshops and receive a 4-pack of these fantastic UIE Virtual Seminar recordings to share with your team:

• UX Design in the Mobile Frontier with Rachel Hinman
• 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture with Louis Rosenfeld
• >Designing with Agile with Anders Ramsay
• Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work with Kim Goodwin

Just register for one or more of our workshops, and we’ll email you instructions on how to access these seminars. Thanks, UIE!

We’re coming to DC!

We’ve just added a Washington, DC stop to our spring 2012 UX workshop tour. We’ll be at the AIA in force from May 7-9, bringing you three fantastic new workshops:

• May 7: Whitney Quesenbery teaches Using Personas and Storytelling Effectively . You already know how good the book is; come learn with Whitney in person.
• May 8: Anders Ramsay teaches Designing with Agile. Anders taught it last fall in London and the session sold out quickly.
• May 9: Lisa Welchman teaches Web Governance for your Organization. Something that’s likely driving you nuts; good thing Lisa is the preeminent expert on the subject.

The early bird registration date is April 6, but don’t wait—tickets will sell quickly. Also, we always offer a discount when three or more register from the same organization, so please spread the word to your colleagues to take advantage.

Hope to see you at one of our Washington workshops this May!