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.
Good news for prototyping enthusiasts
We’re very pleased to be partnering with our friends at Keynotopia on a holiday bundle: their awesome prototyping tools, our awesome Prototyping book (in four digital formats), all for US$22 (a US$76 value).
The offer’s only good until New Year’s day, so now’s the time to check it out!
One answer may win you a book
Let’s say you’re a user experience practitioner, a designer, or a user researcher. Or any of the other titles you might associate with these terms. And you work for a large organization that occasionally brings in outside experts to teach UX-related courses in-house.
The question: who is responsible for identifying the expert and the course they should teach?
40% off everything through January 1
If you’ve been hankering for one of our books or webinars, 40% off is a great deal.
And if you’ve been furtively desirous of our entire collection, it’s an insanely great deal. That’s because we’ve just made the seven-book Rosenfeld Media Library available as a package, itself at a large discount. When you add the two discounts, the paperback+digitals price goes from $199.00 to $119.40 (that works out to $17.06 for each book in five formats, including a lovely paperback). The digitals-only price goes from $99.00 to $59.40 (or $8.49 per book for four digital formats, including ePub and MOBI).
To take advantage of this great deal, enter code HOLIDAY40 at checkout. This offer ends on New Year’s Day.
And speaking of the holidays, your friends at Rosenfeld Media wish you a great one!
Rachel Hinman will chart “The Mobile Frontier”
UX practitioners who want to design better mobile experiences have little guidance in book form. It’s not surprising, given how quickly the mobile landscape is changing.
That’s why we’re excited by The Mobile Frontier, the book that Rachel Hinman has just signed to write for Rosenfeld Media. As you’ll see from her outline, Rachel will cover practical lessons that are technology independent, and map out the hairy challenges that designers need to start working through right away. So the book’s value will be evergreen despite the dynamism of mobile design. And Rachel’s got killer experience working for Nokia, Adaptive Path and Yahoo! that should come in quite handy.
You can keep up with Rachel’s work at her book-in-progress site. And thanks for helping spread the word!
Happy birthday, UX Book Clubs!
Two years old. And, according to the UX Book Club wiki, over 100 clubs around the world. From Portland to Perth, chances are there’s a UX Book Club near you where you can discuss books, network, and have a great time. And if there isn’t? Then start one; it’s incredibly easy.
To help mark the occasion, we’re donating five of our books to the UX Book Clubs’ birthday contest. To enter, tweet the reason you love the UXBC and include the hash tag #uxbookclub2. Do it by November 24.
And while we’re on the subject, remember that publishers like us are more than happy to give free stuff and discounts to clubs that discuss our books.
