Yoni Knoll and Peter Bogaards: new board members
It keeps getting better: InfoDesign’s Peter Bogaards has joined our editorial board, and Yoni Knoll of InfinityPlusOne is now part of our strategic board.
Peter’s work as one of the community’s most important content scouts makes him an obvious choice to help shape Rosenfeld Media’s editorial agenda. Yoni has been instrumental in the overhaul of the soon-to-relaunch UX Zeitgeist service. Both are uniquely talented, connected, and loved within the UX community. And we’re grateful to have them both on our side.
Incredible package of UX tools
This really is quite a great deal: over US$5,000 of usability tools—including all seven of our titles in lovely digital formats—for US$1,350. Optimal Workshop’s package includes Silverback, Loop 11, Ethnio, KISS Metrics and more, as well as their own goodies. The deal is good on November 11 only—World Usability Day, so you can’t possibly forget it. So check it out!
Our books are now Kindle-friendly
From the moment we started publishing, we offered digital editions of our books. At first, if you purchased directly from us, we included a screen-optimized PDF that you could download and use immediately. Then we started offering printer-optimized PDFs for people who’d prefer to print our books themselves, rather than pay and wait for a paperback to be shipped. Earlier this year we started offering ePub editions for use on iPads, iPhones, and Android devices. And now, at your request, we’re pleased to provide Kindle-compliant MOBI versions of each of our books.
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New book signing: “Service Design” by Polaine, Reason, & Løvlie
During her talk at this month’s IDEA Conference, Cindy Chastain referred to Rosenfeld Media’s efforts to develop an ecosystem from scratch. While that’s not quite right—we’ve tried to plug gaps within the existing UX ecosystem—we definitely appreciate the need to view people, content, and products and services as part of a holistic, interdependent ecosystem.
So it should be no surprise that we’ll be publishing Service Design: Designing useful, usable and desirable services. We’re convinced that individual products and services (and designers) succeed when whole systems succeed, and that Andy Polaine, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Løvlie are the right people to show designers how. Andy’s quite respected in the UX community for, among other good works, the Designer’s Review of Books. Ben and Lavrans help run live|work, the UK firm that’s done perhaps the most in evangelizing service design practices.
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A month of gathering ideas
September 2010 flew by:
- the excitement of announcing this book;
- off to HCI2010 at the University of Abertay in Dundee, where I led a workshop on survey design
- back to England and right down to Cornwall for a few days holiday (I know we’re a small island here, but that’s more than 500 miles)
- a quick visit to CX Partners in Bristol for a fascinating informal chat about surveys
- analysing the data and writing the first draft of a report on a survey about how different groups use a camp site for people with physical disabilities
- back home – where, amazingly, the ‘work while you’re away’ fairies had failed to deal with my in-tray
- a great telephone meeting with my development editor
- and a visit to the UK UPA evening about books, where I picked up some tips about writing and some contact details from UX professionals who are willing to talk with me about surveys.
I’ve also had some great email conversations offline, especially with Inge De Bleecker.
Lots of ideas buzzing around in my head, but not a second to tell you about it here and get your opinions. Frustrating!
But please keep those ideas coming, either here or directly to me. I’ll start discussing them here soon, I promise.
Reading is Fundamental
…and the UX Bookmobile is fun. We had a blast trotting it out at the IDEA conference in Philadelphia last week, and are hoping to ride it over to Colorado for those two UXish events this winter. Hmm… Wonder if we can retrofit it with skis?
Leah Buley to write “UX Team of One”
We’ve just signed Adaptive Path’s Leah Buley to write a new Rosenfeld Media book, The UX Team of One. We’re quite excited to work with Leah, who has already delivered some hit presentations on the subject at SXSW, UX Week, and the IA Summit.
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Ferrara walks the walk
This just in: a video game designed by Rosenfeld Media author John Ferrara was awarded second place in a contest organized by Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative. John led a small team to develop Fitter Critters, a virtual pet game designed to teach 9- to 12-year olds healthier eating habits and change the way they think about nutrition. It was selected as runner up from a field of 63 entries by a panel of judges that included Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra. John is the author of the upcoming book Playful Design: Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces, which explores how game-based interfaces can be used to achieve real world objectives. You can read more about the contest and game here.
Downloading digital books to your favorite device
Given how many devices there are out there, as well as a plethora of formats and channels, it’s understandably confusing to get a digital book into your favorite reader. Worse, it seems that the digital publishing landscape changes every fifteen minutes or so.
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New advisors: Harry Max and Kristian Simsarian
We’re pleased to add some great new perspectives to turn to for great advice! Executive coach and Internet pioneer Harry Max will join our strategic board, and IDEO associate partner/CCA faculty member Kristian Simsarian will join our editorial board. If you want to know more about who is guiding us, check out our list of advisors.
