Register today for our expert-led virtual AI workshops!
Workshops

Survey book of the month, October 2011

Which is better: an open question or a closed one? Should you include a “don’t know” option in your closed questions? Is there a “right” order for asking questions?

If topics like these concern you, then you’ll want to read my choice for this month:

Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context by Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser. (1996,  reprinted in 1981)

(more…)

Is it a redesign?

Here in Mr. Rosenfeld’s neighborhood, we’re careful to avoid the word redesign. But whatever it’s called, you may have noticed that we’ve indeed changed a lot of things about the Rosenfeld Media site:

  1. The visual design is quite different. Dave Shea’s lovely work on UX Zeitgeist has now been adapted for the “main” site. Next we’ll apply this design to individual book sites.
  2. The shopping cart has been radically changed and, we hope, improved. We’ve applied the principles from a certain useful book while swapping out Kryptronic and installing Xcart, which seems a bit more flexible.

This is all well and good, and we hope you enjoy the new design and functionality. (And you’ll let us know what could be better, won’t you? In fact, how about a nice discount as an incentive to try it out? Use code WHEW before this Sunday for 30% any individual Rosenfeld Media book or webinar.)

Actually, the biggest change we’ve made is the one you can’t see: getting our back office in order so we can start selling many other types of products. As you may notice, the new main page makes our webinars more prominent; over the coming months you’ll see other product types showing up there. It’s all part of the one-year plan to move from publisher of UX books to purveyor of UX expertise in all logical formats.

Wish us luck!

Introduction to usability testing for survey research

It’s always fascinating to encounter a profession with overlapping interests to our own in UX. The one I’ve been learning this year is survey methodology, and was delighted to find out that they’re really into UX as well.

The short version of this post: I joined forces with Emily Geisen, a survey methodologist to teach a workshop on usability testing at the SAPOR conference. The slides are here: Introduction to usability testing for survey research.

The longer version? Keep reading, for:

  • My visits to survey methodology conferences
  • Survey methodologists run pilot tests
  • Survey methodologists do cognitive interviewing
  • Introduction to usability testing at SAPOR

(more…)

London selling out; still seats for Seattle

The fall UX Workshop series is in full force, with a successful stop in Washington DC now complete. We’ll be in London October 3-5, but seats are almost sold out.

Seattle (September 26-28) is another story, though: please consider joining us there. Steve Portigal will teach you how to interview users with empathy and get fantastic insights from the data you gather. Steve Krug will show you how to develop and run high-quality usability tests at low or no cost. And Lou Rosenfeld will show you how to keep tuning your information architecture on the cheap to fend off expensive, ineffective redesigns.

See you in Seattle?

Rosenfeld author, Fast Company columnist

We love learning from UX failure stories. And we love Victor Lombardi.

So does Fast Company. In fact, they’ll be running many of his failure stories as regular columns in Fast Company’s Co.Design section. The first column just came out; check it out!

We’re now more than a publishing company

Books are dead?

Sigh. No, they’re not.

But we’re no longer a publisher. At least not just a publisher. Let me explain.

Books themselves have never been the point. It’s what’s in them—in our case, expertise that changes how you do UX work—that’s always been more important than the format itself. Great expertise can be delivered in a variety of ways: not just books, but classes, consulting, and an exploding number of newer formats.

So, after years of thought, planning, and fretting, I’m proud to announce that Rosenfeld Media is no longer a publisher. In fact, I’m not sure what to call us. All I can tell you is what we’re doing: building and curating an ecosystem of user experience expertise.

At its center are the experts—at current count, 49—who can help you research and design better. Some are our own books’ authors, some have written excellent books for other publishers, and some are simply too busy to have written a book at all. What distinguishes them? Their combination of smarts and experience is simply without equal.

Our role in this ecosystem is to provide the infrastructure to get their expertise to you, in the formats that make most sense to you. You already know about our books (by the way, there are 14 more in the pipeline), and we’ll continue producing our series of public workshops in at least six cities annually. What’s new are these two lines of business:

  1. Consulting: High-value, short bursts of “teach a man to fish” consulting on dozens of UX-related topics. Bring in a guru for a couple days of advising, coaching, facilitating, showing, and mentoring, rather than extensive, long-term deliverables-based gigs. Think “brain shop” rather than “body shop”.
  2. On-site training: Our experts teach, at the moment, 42 full-day UX courses; it’s really an incredible catalog. Remember that great class you sat in on at the such-and-such conference? Now you can have it taught to your whole team—at your own location.

The upshot? You now have access to stellar UX expertise and education—all from a single source and a brand that, I hope, you’ve come to value. Now you can work directly with an expert whose work you’ve admired for a long time. Or have a critical gap in your team’s knowledge plugged. Or mix and match—work with us to pull together an interdisciplinary board of design advisors to meet with your team every quarter. Or a line-up for an in-house UX conference.

Please let me know if you have other suggestions. After all, this is, from what I can tell, an untested approach, and one that rubs up against two traditional, entrenched business models: large agency consulting (firmly of the 20th century), and book publishing (arguably stuck in the 19th century). Wouldn’t it be swell to disrupt them both at once?

So wish us luck! And, as always, please let me know what you think.

The tweet that could win you a signed book

Yes, yet another Rosenfeld Media Twitter contest! This one wins you a signed copy of a book of your choice written by one of our fall 2011 UX Workshop instructors:

Here’s how you can win:

(more…)

Survey book of the month, August 2011

If you love looking at wonderful information design, you’ll enjoy this book of the month:

Looking back: a century of Dutch statistics by CBS Statistics Netherlands

It’s in English and it’s free as a .pdf download, or you can pay a small fee for a printed copy.

So far this year I’ve chosen survey books that are about information, either key concepts or practical how-to. This month’s book is about inspiration.

(more…)

Tomorrow’s Wacky Wednesday: 50% off Search Analytics for Your Site

This week’s Wacky Wednesday deal: half off Lou Rosenfeld’s brand new book Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers.

The deal runs tomorrow from 12:01am until midnight, GMT-5. We’ll tweet out the discount code from the @rosenfeldmedia Twitter account a few times during the day. Please spread the word!

Tomorrow’s Wacky Wednesday: 50% off Storytelling

This week’s Wacky Wednesday deal: half off Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks’ classic Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting stories for better design.

The deal runs tomorrow from 12:01am until midnight, GMT-5. We’ll tweet out the discount code from the @rosenfeldmedia Twitter account a few times during the day. Please spread the word!