Josh Clark joins our editorial board
We are absolutely thrilled to have mobile design guru and author Josh Clark of Global Moxie join our editorial board. Like our other editorial advisors, Josh will be helping us identify potential authors and topics, and evaluate book proposals. So don’t be surprised if you notice, in a year or two, that we have a raft of great new mobile design books coming out. Welcome aboard, Josh!
Survey book of the month, December 2011
Many of us will be doing a lot of gift-giving this month, so I’ve chosen a book that would be just right for someone who enjoys something thought-provoking and a bit out of the usual:
Through the language glass: why the world looks different in other languages by Guy Deutscher (2010; paperback 2011)
One for fun – or to provoke some thought
My recent picks have been worthwhile, but not the easiest to read. This one is more fun, but it also got me thinking.
(more…)
Our holiday deal: 40% off everything!
Put the hum in humbug: take 40% off all of our books and webinars by using discount code HUMBUG when checking out. This crazy deal is good through Friday, December 16. After that, you’re on your own.
Storytelling for UX now available in Japanese
We’re very happy to report that, thanks to the esteemed Japanese publisher Maruzen, Storytelling for User Experience (by Kevin Brooks and Whitney Quesenbery) will soon be available in Japanese! It will go on sale via Amazon Japan on December 14:
This translation wouldn’t be available if it wasn’t for the wonderful efforts of the Japanese user experience community, especially Yoshinori Wakizaka (@wackiesrock). Thank you all!
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)
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:
- 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.
- 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
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:
- 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”.
- 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.
