“Web Form Design” now on sale!

We’re excited to announce that Luke Wroblewski’s long-awaited book, “Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks,” is now available! And with hundreds of sales since our soft launch earlier today, apparently we’re not the only ones!

When you buy directly from Rosenfeld Media, you’ll pay US$36 for the paperback and digital editions, US$19 for digital only. (Compare with US$36 for paperback only at Amazon.)

The paperback is 244 pages with high quality paper stock, a sewn binding, and a full color interior. At 6″x9″, it’ll be easy to stuff in your carry-on bag for reading during the flight to your next client meeting. And of course, the digital edition (373 pages) is pretty easy to take along too; in fact, it’s been designed, tested, and optimized for on-screen use. Both editions are graced with 216 illustrations, which we’ve made available for you via Flickr to peruse, download, and use in your own presentations.

We’re quite thrilled with Luke’s work—from his original research to the volume of practical advice he’s managed to cram into this book. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we have.

Donna Spencer at Web Directions South

Donna (Maurer) Spencer, author of the forthcoming Rosenfeld Media book on card sorting, will be speaking at Web Directions South in Melbourne on May 16. The organizers have been kind enough to provide friends of Rosenfeld Media with a discount on the registration fee; details (including the discount code) follow:

Conference: Web Directions User Experience – Melbourne
When: May 15 and 16 2008
Where: Melbourne Town Hall
ux08.webdirections.org/

A one-day two-track conference, plus optional extra day of workshops, focusing on the concepts, technologies and techniques for building great user experiences on the web: interaction design, usability and testing, user research and ethnography, Ajax and Javascript, content, designing for email and mobile and more.

Speakers include Rosenfeld Media author Donna (Maurer) Spencer, as well as Robert Hoekman Jr (Miskeeto), Andy Budd (Clearleft) and many others.

Special offer: register with the promo code “Rosenfeld” before April 25 to secure your ticket for just $AU445.

Visit our updated events page to learn where Rosenfeld Media authors will be presenting next.

UX Zeitgeist: open for business

Over the past year or two, we’ve been working on a new service for the user experience, and it’s now ready for you to use and, more importantly, participate in. It’s called UX Zeitgeist, and our goal is to profile the books that the UX community uses, and the books that they want to see published.

All it takes is getting a lot of people in the UX community to answer three simple questions. We take your answers and aggregate them with information from a host of other UX-related sites. The results include some potentially wonderful benefits, ranging from a communally-developed and ranked library of UX books, an index of UX topics that the community is wondering about, and information on UX people that’s useful for research and egosurfing alike. You can track all sorts of information by charts that show trends, and there are RSS feeds galore.

Want to try it out? Please do; it’s free. Want to participate? Let us know; it should only take you a few minutes. Want to learn more? Watch the video on YouTube (it’s short: 5:44) or right here.

Another special discount: 2008 An Event Apart conferences

Adaptive Path hearts Rosenfeld Media (see >yesterday’s announcement). So does A List Apart. They’re providing a discount to friends of Rosenfeld Media to attend their wonderful An Event Apart conferences, the design conference “for people who make websites”. Luke Wroblewski, Liz Danzico, and Lou Rosenfeld are RMers who’ve spoken at An Event Apart, and we’ve all enjoyed an excellent experience as both presenters and attendees.

This is truly a great value, and it’s even better with the Rosenfeld Media discount. Use code AEASKLR to save $200 off at the An Event Apart site. We hope to see you at one of this year’s AEA conferences:

Boston: June 23/24
San Francisco: August 18/19
Chicago: October 13/14

Special discount to Adaptive Path MX conference

Our colleagues at Adaptive Path would like to provide friends of Rosenfeld Media with a discount to the Managing Experience conference. MX San Francisco is coming up very soon (April 20-22); don’t miss your chance to hear wonderful presentations from such luminaries as Matt Jones and RM board member Nathan Shedroff. You can learn more here; use discount code MXRM to receive 10% off the registration price.

Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: update and a discount

We’re quite excited to be publishing Luke Wroblewski’s new book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. And based on the hundreds of requests we’ve received for publication notification, we’re not the only ones. So it’s a wonderful relief to report that the book should go to the printer this week, and be available in about four weeks.

Haven’t yet signed up for publication notification? Do it now and we’ll provide you a discount code you can use when you purchase Luke’s book at the Rosenfeld Media site. Signing up will take you about 30 seconds. (And yes, it involves a web form.) We’ll email you with the discount code sometime around April 20, when the book goes on sale.

Did I say that it’s looking fantastic?

New Episode of the Rosenfeld Review Podcast: The Evolution of Joint Futures Conference with Producer Angelos Arnis

I’m delighted to report that Kevin Brooks and Whitney Quesenbery have begun work on a new Rosenfeld Media book, tentatively titled Storytelling for User Experience Design. We’re all familiar with the power of storytelling—most UX people already use stories to help communicate research and data, explain design concepts, and persuade colleagues, often without realizing it.

So perhaps the time has come for a practical book that teaches UX practitioners to use storytelling in a more active, explicit way. We hope that Storytelling for User Experience Design will place storytelling alongside other, more conventional research and design methods. And we invite you to engage with the book from its inception by sharing your questions, comments and ideas with Kevin and Whitney and others interested in the topic. Please bookmark their “book-in-progress” site or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Whitney and Kevin bring wonderfully complementary perspectives to the topic. As past UPA president, highly involved in the STC, a UXnet co-founder, and one of the instigators of World Usability Day, Whitney is well-respected in the UX world. Kevin is a professional storyteller, regularly writing and performing at festivals; he’s no UX slouch either, with a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and a day job researching new technologies for Motorola. You can learn more about Kevin and Whitney from their site. I’m really looking forward to working with them both.

New book underway: “Storytelling for User Experience Design”

Indi Young and Luke Wroblewski presenting at UIE’s Web App Summit

On March 26, Luke Wroblewski and Indi Young will both teach workshops at UIE’s Web App Summit, held March 26-28 at the lovely Coronado Hotel, San Diego, California.

Luke will teach a day-long workshop on Web Form Design Best Practices, while Indi will spend the day on Mental Models. If you’ve loved Indi’s book, or want a preview of Luke’s new one, this is the place to be. And as an additional incentive, use promotion code “rosenfeld” for $30 off each day of the event.

You can also catch talks by other Rosenfeld Media authors in the coming months; visit our events calendar for a comprehensive listing.

15,400 kilometers / 9,600 miles in 3 days

That’s how long it took a copy of Indi Young’s Mental Models to travel from our warehouse outside Detroit in the USA to a suburb of Canberra, Australia. (All hail DHL!) And it took the digital edition mere seconds. I guess it really is possible for a small startup to do business globally. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the list of countries below; it’s where we’ve sold books since going live two weeks ago.

Whether you purchase our books as molecules, bits, or both, we want to serve you well but know we can do better. We’re working hard on improving our shopping experience, and many of you have already provided us with invaluable input to that end. Thank you. It’ll get better, and we hope you’ll continue letting us know how we can improve. You can comment below, take a dip in our customer forum, or send me an email (lou [at] rosenfeldmedia.com).

OK, that list of countries:

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