The future: now 25% off!
Many of you have brightened many a day here at Rosenfeld Media headquarters by asking if you could subscribe to our books. Well, here’s our bad news/good news response.
First, the bad news: we can’t offer you a new book, like clockwork, every quarter or month—we simply don’t which books will be coming out when. Authors are just that way.
Now the good—no, great—news: as of today, you can purchase the next four books we publish right now, at a 25% discount. We don’t know which books those will be—but there will be books. In fact, as of this moment, we have a cool dozen in the pipeline, and anticipate publishing five of them in 2011.
Now partnering with O’Reilly on digital book sales
We’ve got big news: we’ve just finalized an agreement with O’Reilly Media, and from now on they’ll handle all indirect sales of our digital editions. This means that Rosenfeld Media books will soon be available in an incredible array of new channels, including Android Market, Amazon’s Kindle store, Apple’s App Store, iBookStore, and iTunes, the Safari Books Online subscription service, and Kobo. It’s no secret that O’Reilly is a true pioneer when it comes to digital publishing. We’re thrilled that we’ll be working with and learning from them in the coming years.
You’ll still be able to purchase our digital editions—in two flavors of PDF, as well as MOBI and ePUB, directly from our web site. But we’re glad to work with O’Reilly to get you our books in other ways too. We’ll have more information to share soon.
Surveys in the news: Valentine’s day
It was a familiar type of email, and one that I’d usually just delete, but in the interests of this book I opened it. “Valentine’s Day Romance Survey Results” from Fresh Flowers and Gifts in Australia. The same material is repeated on their web site, but I assume that it’s a seasonal promotion so here are the key points. I’m guessing that the panel referred to in the survey consisted of a
couple of people in the Fresh Flowers and Gift’s marketing office. In
other words, they made it up. No worries, the survey was just for fun
and that comes across pretty clearly in the results.
Read on and enjoy – and then I’ll discuss some more scientific surveys.
SUS: a good enough usability questionnaire
One challenge of survey design is whether to:
- use an existing questionnaire, or
- roll-your-own, or
- do some sort of hybrid.
One of the best-known usability questionnaires is SUS. Is it good enough?
I’m going to start by mentioning the advantages and disadvantages of reusing questionnaires, and then talk about SUS in more detail.
(more…)
UX Bookmobile takes a roadtrip
The UX Bookmobile is about to make its way to snowy Colorado. It’ll start out its frosty tour in Boulder, taking in the IxDA’s Interaction conference with its two acolytes in tow. After enjoying a few days of microbrews, meditation, and quinoa salads, it’ll dodge over to Aspen for an extended ski break, then head to Denver for the IA Summit, and yet more microbrews.
(more…)
Forthcoming book on eye tracking from Aga Bojko
Eye tracking applications are beginning to proliferate, and many vendors would have you believe that their particular technology will suit all of your user research needs. What’s needed is a clear, practical, and skeptical perspective on the method and the technologies to counter-balance the marketing noise.
That’s why we’re very happy to have signed Aga Bojko, a researcher at User Centric and editor at UPA’s User Experience magazine, to help make sense of eye tracking. Her book, Eye Tracking the User Experience (due out in early 2012), will offer practical step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare and conduct eye tracking studies, how to analyze and interpret eye movement data, and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.
Please keep up with (and, when you can, contribute to) Aga’s progress by following her work at her book’s site (here’s its RSS feed). And of course, we’ll be glad to let you know when the book comes out (and send you a nice discount) if you request a publication notification>.
Survey book of the month, January 2011
You’re looking for a book on surveys, and my one isn’t yet out. What do to?
I thought I’d help by sharing some of my favorites over the next few months. These will be the titles that I find myself turning to again and again, whether to check a point I’m writing about or when I’m designing a survey myself.
Top of my list has got to be “Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method” by Don A. Dillman, Jolene D. Smyth and Leah Melani Christian (Wiley, 2008)
A book with practical insights backed by research
Why do I like it so much? Well, it certainly isn’t a visual feast. The cover isn’t all that inspiring, and here’s a sample page of content – deliberately made small so you can get an inkling of what the design is like. Yes, that’s a solid block of text there, and it’s fairly representative.
The value in this book is all in what it says. Don Dillman has been researching surveys for 50 years. He’s the author or co-author of over 240 papers, and he’s co-written 9 other books in addition to this book and its three previous incarnations under slightly different titles. All this might lead you to suspect that the book is a dry, academic tome that will be hard work. You’d be wrong.
Yes, it’s impeccably referenced throughout. But it’s also practical. This is a team that believes strongly in testing everything, varying everything, and testing again – in one-on-one usability tests, A/B tests and experiments. I opened my copy at random just now and here’s a typical passage:
“Often web survey designers and programmers are on the cutting edge of computer technology, have the most recent versions of web browsers, and are adept at customising their own settings. However, it is important to design and test the web survey from the respondent perspective; the respondent may not be as computer savvy or familiar with being online. In one of our recent student surveys, we decided to send a tester out to a number of different computer labs at our university because many respondents would be completing the survey on campus. In the process of testing, it was discovered that two labs on campus had not updated their browsers in 5 years. Although many students were aware of that and avoided using those labs, others did not know and may have completed the survey on those computers with the outdated browsers”.
I’m sure it’s not news to you that there is often a gap between what your developers are using as their technology and what the users might know. But how many academic researchers do you know who would be willing to go from lab to lab checking something like that? How many people, when they start to design a survey, ask themselves “How many of our respondents are likely to be on old browsers?” before you raise that point with them?
You may be thinking “OK, but what will I learn in that book that I don’t already know?”
My answer: lots. To show you what I mean, here’s another picture. When I got my copy of this latest edition (pre-ordered, based on avidly reading and re-reading the two previous editions), I went through it marking only the most crucial points that I knew I would definitely need to think about for my book on surveys. Then I went back and challenged myself: is this point absolutely essential for the busy user experience practitioner? And here’s the photo of the results of that two-step process, showing a host of markers.
What you won’t find in the book
If you’re still with me, you probably have another question: “If this book is that good, why are you writing another one?”
Even though the book is over 500 pages long, it doesn’t cover the entire survey process. Dillman and his co-authors assume that:
- you have a clear set of goals for the research
- you have the resources to do a proper random sample, and a multi-stage administration process
- you know how to analyze the data.
So there are some aspects missing that we probably ought to think about it – and also, we don’t all have time to read that much. So I’m still working on my (much shorter) book.
Be a charter subscriber, win our books!
That newsletter we’d mentioned before? Well, it’ll debut later this month! We’ve finally settled on a name—the Rosenfeld Review—and other than following our tens of thousands of weekly tweets, it’ll be the best way to keep up with what we’re up to. We’re planning on publishing the Rosenfeld Review monthly, and we’ll include some rich, useful content—more than the normal “look at us” newsletter fare.
We’d love for you to be a charter subscriber. If you sign up by Tuesday, January 25, we’ll enter you to receive one of three great prizes:
- The Feels as Good as the Flying you do in your Dreams Prize: A complete set of our books, in both paperback and four digital formats.
- The Unicorns that Eat Out of your Hand Prize: A complete set of our books, but in digital formats only.
- The Dark Chocolate of the Gods Prize: Any Rosenfeld title of your choice, in both paperback and four digital formats.
Sign up below by Tuesday, January 25; thanks!
Canadian orders now ship from… Canada!
If you live in Canada, you probably hate spending a boatload on shipping when buying from US-based retailers. If you’re a US-based retailer, you hate it too (especially when the Canadian government randomly assigns huge duties to your shipments).
Well, we at Rosenfeld Media want all this hating to stop. So as of today, we’re shipping our books out of Shipwire’s Toronto-area fulfillment center. If you’re based in Canada, you should now experience shipping rates and times that we believe will be more in line with what you expect and deserve. Please let us know if you encounter any glitches or have any questions at all.
Writing and looking for stories
So, what’s been happening with the surveys book for the last three months? A lot!
- Wrote the first chunk of the book, on rating scales (sneak preview: I come out in favour of 5 points).
- Went to Australia for a holiday and the OzCHI conference. Took the opportunity to do a bunch of interviews with Australian UX people on how they use surveys. Lots of ideas.
- Taught a revised version of my surveys tutorial at OzCHI. Lots more ideas, and a new outline for the book.
- Came back, went to Lausanne for a day and got caught in the UK snow in December. Got to know every inch of Geneva airport and practice my British skills in queuing.
- Enjoyed Christmas.
- Created a revised outline for the book based on all those ideas from Australia.
- Didn’t enjoy the New Year at all due to a most annoying cold that turned into conjunctivitis.
Now I’m better and catching up with my New Year resolution to post more on this blog. And I know that Lou is watching me… so here is the start.
