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.
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.
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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.
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