Survey book of the month, March 2011
Surveys are all about getting numeric data, and then reporting on it. What points do you want to make with those numbers? I’ll assume that you are aiming to be honest, respecting your data and your audience.
One fun way of learning about the tricks that people play with data, or perhaps the mistakes that they make inadvertently, is to read my March pick for survey book of the month:
Darrell Huff (1954) “How to lie with statistics”
Published in the US by W. W. Norton & Company with illustrations by Irving Geis; in the UK by Penguin with illustrations by Calman.
Huff aims to teach us “how to look a phoney statistic in the eye and face it down; and no less
important, how to recognize sound and usable data in [the] wilderness of
fraud”.
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Free pass to Healthcare Experience Design conference (and a set of our books)
Update: And the winners are… Sarah Mitchell (@sgmitch), who will be attending the Healthcare Experience Design conference on a free pass, and Zoran Krnetic (@krneticz), who will receive a complete set of our books. Congratulations, Sarah and Zoran!
Interested in healthcare and UX? Then you should be attending the Healthcare Experience Design Conference (Boston, April 11). It’s being organized by Mad*Pow and Claricode, and our own Peter Jones is participating in their stellar program.
And now you can win a free conference pass (a $595 value) or a complete set of Rosenfeld Media books—all it takes is a tweet! Here’s how:
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Our O’Reilly partnership now official
Last month we gave you a heads-up that O’Reilly Media would soon be selling the digital versions of our books through all channels (other than, of course, our own site). Partnering with O’Reilly makes it much easier for a small publisher like Rosenfeld Media to get its products into the burgeoning array of digital channels, like the Android Market, Apple’s iTunes and iBookstore, and the Safari library. Plus O’Reilly is just a great company for us to partner with.
Soon is today, and to commemorate this auspicious event, O’Reilly is offering the digital versions of our books at 50% off through their site. Take advantage of this great deal before the day is done!
Test our first book! (in Manhattan, October 11)
We at Rosenfeld Media love to eat our own dog food, so to speak. As a publisher of user experience books, we’re looking to apply some usability research strategies to test both print and digital editions of our first book, Indi Young’s Mental Models. To do this, we need your help.
We are looking for volunteers who can come in for 45 minutes or so on Thursday, October 11. You will be asked to answer some questions about yourself and the book, and to perform a few tasks, such as locating information within the book. The sessions will take place at the lovely offices of Behavior Design in Manhattan (40 West 27th Street, Suite 401; map).
We’re offering a $50 Amazon gift certificate as a thanks to our volunteers.
Please contact us if you need more information or require more convincing.
Test an email client, get a free book
Our new newsletter, the Rosenfeld Review (sign up here), is just about ready to go. But first we’d like to test it out with a few common mail clients. If you use one of the following clients and can spend a few minutes kicking the tires of our newsletter, we’d be glad to send you one of our books in four sparkling digital formats (ePUB, MOBI, screen-optimized PDF, and printer-optimized PDF):
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Rosenfeld featured in Digital Book World interview
Anne Kostick kindly interviewed Lou Rosenfeld for her latest “Digital Reading” column in Digital Book World. The publishing world is really starting to see the value of user experience, and it’s wonderful to be part of that trend.
Survey book of the month, February 2011
This month, I’ve been working on my chapter on survey questions and revisiting my libary of books about questions. My favorite, easily, is:
“The Psychology of Survey Response” by Roger Tourangeau, Lance J. Rips and Kenneth Rasinski (2000) Cambridge University Press.
Let me take you through their main framework and some of my recent experiences with the book, and I hope that will explain why I like it so much.
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2010 in 46 surveys: too many
I take a lot of screenshots: web sites in general, forms specifically, and of course surveys. Those specific to a project go into particular folders; the rest are filed by year.
Today I was hunting through for inspiration for the chapter I’m working on, and got tired of flicking past non-survey things. So I moved all the surveys ones into a separate folder, and then thought: well, how many surveys are there anyway?
Now, I obviously I do a lot of surveys for professional reasons. I’m a member of one of the internet panels, just to see what they’re like. I’m working with a market research client on the user experience of their surveys. I’ve been creating a few examples of my own, and my husband has been investigating what you can get for free in a few survey tools. And if a friendly person asks me to advise informally on a survey for a volunteer or professional group, chances are that I will. So I discounted them.
That left 46 surveys that I actually completed in 2010.
Nearly one a week.
I’m sure I’m far more willing than most people to have a go at a survey, because I’m collecting materials for this book. If I possibly can, I’ll do them, but even then I’d say that I’m only able to do about a third of those that I’m asked to do. Just too busy.
Can it really be true that I’m getting around 3 survey invitations each week?
During March, I’ll try to record every invitation as well as the completions.
But maybe there’s a clue here about the general decline in response rates: there are just way too many of them.
UX workshops on parade
We’re putting on our first Rosenfeld Media speaking tour! An all-star cast of Rosenfeld Media authors and friends will be visiting San Francisco, Atlanta, and Chicago over the coming months, and we’d love you to be part of it. Each day-long workshop is very hands-on and very intimate. Frankly, you’re not really supposed to enjoy yourself so much while learning. But we think you will.
Here’s the line-up; register now to take advantage of early bird discounts (we discount groups as well):
Make It So: learn interaction design from science fiction
If you’re excited by the interfaces you see in films like Minority Report and District 9, now you can justify the hours you’ve spent watching Star Trek episodes and other science fiction films and television. Design has always been a form of fiction, so it comes as no surprise that interaction designers can benefit from the processes and concepts created for these stories. Whether you watch on your tricorder, er, iPhone, on the big screen, or on your iPad (which, by the way, you might have caught a glimpse of back in 2004 watching The Incredibles), science fiction can offer serious design insight as well as fascinating fun.
Science fiction has remained a pastime for designers, instead of a valuable source of insight and learning—until now. Make It So, by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel, will be the first book to connect the inspiring “blue sky” designs of scifi with your own work in interaction design. We’re very excited to be publishing this book, and expect it to be available in late 2011.
