Books we’d like to publish

If you’re interested in what we’re considering for future books — as a potential author or just because—you might want to check Lou’s short piece on our editorial agenda.

Indi Young’s “Mental Models” now on sale

We’re pleased to announce that Rosenfeld Media’s first book, Indi Young’s Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior is now available for purchase!

Mental Models is available in both full-color high quality paperback and screen-optimized digital editions. In fact, when you purchase the paperback, we’ll include the digital version, which will arrive in your inbox moments after purchase. We’ve also made much of Mental Models’ supplementary content and all of its images available via the book’s substantial web site and Flickr, respectively. At US$36 for paperback/digital, and US$19 for digital only, we feel we’re providing great value in addition to great content.

We’re able to provide you the best value because we’re foregoing the retail route; you won’t find Mental Models at your local bookseller. You can order it from Amazon, but you’ll only receive the print version that way. So… please order Mental Models directly from Rosenfeld Media today, and let us know how you like it (and how we can do better)!

Rich Wiggins search analytics workshop in Sydney

Rich Wiggins will be making the big trip across the pond to Sydney, where he’ll teach a day-long workshop on site search analytics on March 6. Rich’s workshop is based on the material in his forthcoming book Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with your Customers. He is fresh off teaching the workshop at Nielsen Norman’s Barcelona and Las Vegas events, and his Australian appearance is being produced by the good folks at Key Forums. The event is sponsored by the Information Architecture Institute, the Australian Library and Information Association, the Records Management Association of Australasia, and Image and Data Manager magazine.

Keep tuned to this page for other Rosenfeld Media author events (and discounts).

Indi Young will teach a UIE virtual seminar: details and a discount

On February 20, Indi Young will be presenting the virtual seminar “Mental Models: Getting into your customer’s head” for User Interface Engineering.

UIE’s Jared Spool and Christine Perfetti have been great champions of Indi’s mental models work, and we’re excited that they’re helping get the word out in a different channel. They’ve provided a special discount for friends of Rosenfeld Media: sign up on their site with promotion code RMYOUNG1 and you can register for the seminar and receive Indi’s book for the discounted price of $129—a savings of $30 off the regular price. (Note: This discount cannot be combined with any other promotions offered.)

Keep tuned to this page for other Rosenfeld Media author events (and discounts).

Keeping you satisfied

Do you have any Rosenfeld Media-related questions, answers, or comments? Then have a look at, a hosted “people powered” customer service tool developed by Adaptive Path co-founder Lane Becker and friends. We’ll try Satisfaction out over the coming months to see if it’s the right tool for answering your questions about forthcoming books, shipping options, book errata or anything else you’d like to know about Rosenfeld Media and its products.

Rosenfeld Media Author Events

We’ve just posted our calendar of author presentations and appearances for 2008. Please check back often, and if you’re not already subscribed to Rosenfeld Media’s announcements feed, you should be; we’ll post numerous discounts for our author’s events right here.

Indi Young’s Mental Models book is on the way

We’re just putting the finishing touches on our first book, Indi Young’s Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior. If all goes well, Indi’s wonderful book will be sent to the printer next week, and go on sale in about a month. (Want to be notified when it’s available? Click here.)

As you’d expect of a publisher’s first book, it’s been a long, arduous haul chock-full of good, hard lessons. But Indi’s work really stands out, and we’re quite pleased with the end result. We hope you will be too.

We’re especially glad (and even a little relieved) that we tested the design of the book’s printed edition (using a bound full-color prototype (printed by LuLu.com). The data gleaned from observing target readers perform common tasks and complete a post-test questionnaire was incredibly valuable; all publishers should be doing this. (We’ll be testing the PDF edition of the book later this month, and if you’re in the New York City area and would like to be a test subject, please let us know.)

For now, you’ll have to settle for a taste of the end product; here are Mental Models’ lovely front and back covers, designed by Jason Kernevich of The Heads of State:

Update (12/27/07): Mea culpa, we were a little optimistic in this post, but Indi’s book is indeed at the printer now, and we’re told it’ll be done in about a month’s time. Again, let us know if you’d like to be notified when it goes on sale.

Short presentation on Rosenfeld Media

Lou Rosenfeld was asked to present at last week’s IIT Institute of Design’s Design Research Conference. He discussed how Rosenfeld Media is approaching and solving many of its business challenges with design thinking and design methods. The slides are playable here:

UX consciousness in business magazines

Last month, we published our research on the degree of “user experience consciousness” we found among the analyst firms. The results were quite interesting, so we’ve repeated our method to assess the UX consciousness of mainstream business publications. Here are the eight publications we chose, based on an informal poll of about ten colleagues who work at the intersection of business strategy and user experience:

1. Harvard Business Review
2. The Economist
3. Business Week
4. Fast Company
5. Business 2.0
6. Inc.
7. Entrepreneur
8. Strategy + Business

(more…)

A dash of agile, a dash of peer review: How we evaluate book proposals

We’ve been hunting for a book on the intersection of agile development methods and UX design for quite some time. While we’ve not quite nabbed our quarry yet, I recently realized that we’re already taking something of an agile approach when it comes to developing and evaluating book proposals. We start with two people (the author and me) iterating for a few weeks on a concept until it’s a proposal. Then we move to a formal, traditional peer review phase. We hope this balanced process will help authors hit the ground running and write the best possible books. Here’s how we do it:

Most prospective authors feel that they can’t approach a publisher without a formal, complete proposal. Well, we do need one, folks, and we even require completing a fairly traditional book proposal template. But I know first-hand how off-putting the proposal process can be, and I’m sure it filters out the good along with the not-so-good.

Instead, I remind prospective authors that a book is a snapshot of a dialogue that the author is having with a large collection of colleagues. And, in Rosenfeld Media’s case, that dialogue starts with me (I wear a lot of hats, including serving as Chief Acquisitions Editor). I ask the author to send me a simple paragraph or two elevator pitch, and perhaps a very basic top-level outline. If it’s within our editorial sweet spot, I’ll review it and provide feedback. We’ll bounce it back and forth a few times, tuning and improving it with each iteration, until we achieve something that looks like a formal proposal and one that we both feel good about. It usually takes 3-4 weeks. That’s the part that’s at least agile-ish, if not formally agile.

Next we expand the dialogue: I pitch the proposal to Rosenfeld Media’s editorial board, and pay them to review it and provide comments. Though I’m calling it peer review, “expert review” might be a better choice, based on the board’s composition. The board can and often does reject proposals, but at minimum the prospective author walks away with excellent feedback from a panel of distinguished colleagues. If the proposal does get accepted, then the dialogue expands again—this time to include you, our potential readers, via our “book-in-progress” sites.

I think it’s interesting that we’ve organically developed a process that combines traditional, structured and new-fangled, fluid aspects. But what’s important are the results; as our first book nears completion, we’ll soon see what the market has to say. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the process—and your book ideas.