November author events update

Other than the fact that Luke Wroblewski is clearly the hardest working man in user experience (just look at all those talks!), the big events news is the new Future Practice Webinar series, co-produced by Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media.
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Server migration on tap for this evening

Tonight, at around 7pm ET, the Rosenfeld Media web environment will move to a dedicated server at a new ISP. Given that our environment has many moving parts, it’s hard to imagine that things will be working perfectly once the change-over is made. So we’d greatly appreciate both your patience and your flagging any problems and letting us know ASAP. And if for some reason you can’t make a purchase via our shopping cart, you can still buy our books via Amazon. Many thanks!

Updated, 2pm ET October 5: Seems like we’re back up and running, and able to handle purchases. Our digital downloading, however, is not quite there. You may experience very long download times, or the download might time-out altogether. If this happens to you, just let us know and we’ll find another way to get you the file. Or just log back and try again in a day or so from now, when it should be working better. Thanks for your patience! Server migrations: can’t live with’em, …

Updated, 3pm ET October 13: Everything should be back to normal now.

Raffling off a free IDEA registration

In a not-so-subtle ploy to get you to subscribe to our brand new mailing list, Rosenfeld Media is raffling off a seat at the IA Institute’s IDEA conference (Chicago, USA; October 7-8), a US$550 value. This year’s event, of which we’re a proud sponsor, includes such honchos as David Armano, Jason Fried, and Jesse James Garrett.

To be eligible for the raffle, subscribe to our list by 9am ET September 29.

The list postings will be exactly the same as our announcements feed’s content: infrequent, irregular, and brief notices about new books, discounts, author events, and a few other tidbits. We just thought it might be nice to provide an alternative (and hopefully more viral) way to keep up with Rosenfeld Media.

Updated, October 3: We have a winner: Madhura Chavan, an MDes student at the IIT Institute of Design. Enjoy IDEA, Madhura!

New book signing: Nathan Shedroff on sustainable design

Four years ago, Peter Morville rolled out the user experience honeycomb, with its seven facets of UX. Since then, there’s been something of a cottage industry of suggesting new facets (all of which, unfortunately, throw off the geometry of Peter’s elegant hexagon).

Perhaps it’s time to consider adding yet another facet: sustainability. What and how we design has implications, especially when our designs are ultimately fabricated, transported, and physically consumed. In this time of post-peak oil and environmental worries, designers have an even greater responsibility to consider how our work impacts our planet.

That’s why Rosenfeld Media will be publishing Nathan Shedroff’s newest book, “Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable”. It’s a bit of a departure for us—this is not a practical UX “method” book—but if it helps all of us to bake sustainability into our design processes, it might be the most practical topic we could ever cover.

It’s also an opportunity to work with Nathan, who continues to make amazing contributions to the field. His energy is boundless, and his passion for sustainability is humbling. We can’t wait for his book to arrive!

Want to find out when the book is available (and receive a discount to boot)? Sign up for a publication notification. You can engage with Nathan and learn more about the topic at his book-in-progress site, and keep up with the book’s progress by subscribing to the site’s RSS feed.

Kevin Cheng to write Rosenfeld Media book

Many in the user experience world are become quite familiar with Kevin Cheng’s wit and perspective through OK/Cancel, the brilliant comic strip he co-creates with Tom Chi (more about Kevin here.) Now we’ll get to delve further into Kevin’s creative mind: he’s agreed to write See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas for Rosenfeld Media. Kevin and I have been bouncing around this book idea for years, and I’m thrilled that we’ll have an opportunity to work together.

Many recognize that comics are a powerful design tool, but assume they need to be artists to create comics. Through his workshops Kevin has been disproving that assumption for years, and now his book will do the same for a wider audience. See What I Mean will teach anyone, regardless of drawing ability, how to use comics to communicate design concepts effectively.

Like all Rosenfeld Media books, Kevin’s begins with a book-in-progress site where he’ll share his ideas as they develop, and where we hope you’ll do the same. We invite you to engage in Kevin’s writing process; this is your opportunity to shape what we believe will be a mainstay on every designer’s bookshelf for years to come. You can also keep up with the book’s progress by subscribing to its RSS feed.

Service outage affecting Rosenfeld Media’s site

Update, July 16, 2:30pm ET: All aspects of our purchasing process, including downloads and confirmations, now seem to be working properly. Please let me know (lou [at] rosenfeldmedia.com) if you find anything amiss; many thanks for your patience!

Update, July 15, 11:30am ET: Downloading seems to be working again, so you should be able to order successfully from our store. However, there still seems to be one more glitch: transaction confirmation emails aren’t being sent consistently. You will still see a confirmation page on the site once you complete your purchase, just not an email version of the same. Please email me (lou [at] rosenfeldmedia.com) if you need a PDF of a confirmation emailed to you. And thanks for your patience!

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It’s a long story: our hosting service performed an “upgrade” performed on our dedicated server Saturday morning, followed by all sorts of problems. And today, they performed a reversion to our original set up, followed by… all sorts of problems.

We’re working on it, but if you wish to purchase a Rosenfeld Media book right away: as much as it pains me to say this, please buy it via Amazon.com for now. If you only want our books in digital format (unavailable via Amazon), or still prefer to purchase from us directly, please email me (lou [at] rosenfeldmedia.com) and I’ll send you an email as soon as we’re back up and running. (We’ll run an update here too.)

Until then, all good vibes, wishes, and prayers would be appreciated…

Digital editions: some input please?

An interesting suggestion came up yesterday in our Satisfaction customer service forum. Aileenf suggested selling digital editions of our books that are designed to be printed.

So far we’ve designed and tested our digital editions with the goal of supporting on-screen use. That means a large typeface for readability, no need to scroll within pages, and a bunch more screen-friendly features. Not surprisingly, it also means very long page counts. And though we’ve tried to make our digital design printer-friendly by removing toner-thirsty colored backgrounds, it’s still no fun to print 400+ pages.

So, we could expand our offerings to include digital editions optimized for laser printing. This would certainly help our overseas customers who are concerned about shipping costs. But many questions remain:

• Would we cannibalize our paperback sales? (We’ve already spent lots of money printing thousands of copies of our beautiful four-color interior nicely-bound paperbacks.)
• How many pages to print is too many? Our two paperbacks run between 250-300 pages; is that so much better than printing 400 pages?
• Would it make sense to offer a printable PDF only in combination with an on-screen PDF? While offering options is a good idea, three or four variations of a product, as well as combinations, can quickly become overwhelming to customers (and difficult to develop from an interaction design perspective).

Those are a few of the questions we’ll be mulling over; any feedback, suggestions or (egads) even more questions would be greatly appreciated.

Diane Cerra joins Rosenfeld Media’s strategic board

I’m very excited to announce that Diane Cerra has joined our strategic advisory board. Diane is a publishing industry insider who’s been wonderfully generous with her advice for our fledgling publishing house. It seemed silly not to formalize the relationship!

Diane serves as executive editor at Morgan & Claypool Publishers, where she publishes the HCI Series and other computer and information science-related series in the Synthesis Digital Library. She is former publisher at Morgan Kaufmann, where she founded and published books in the MK Series in Interactive Technologies, among other classic texts and references.

Welcome Diane; we’re glad to have you!

Our authors get around #2

We’ve just updated our author events page, and it’s exciting to see where Rosenfeld Media’s authors will be appearing during the next six months. Destinations include Australia, China, Canada, New Zealand, and all over the USA. Here are just a few of the newly-added events:

• Kevin Brooks’ “Storytelling for User Experience Design” talk at UX Week 2008 in San Francisco
• Donna (Maurer) Spencer’s “Designing Interaction in the Age of Ajax” workshop at Web Directions South in Sydney
• Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” workshop at the Involution Master Academy in Sunnyvale, California

We update our author event calendar every month or two.

Book design and testing

A lot of thought went into the designs of both our paperback and digital editions. Not to mention the testing of those designs. Want to know how we did it? Read this brief interview in UXmatters magazine by Joshua Kaufman.