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:
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:
- Harvard Business Review
- The Economist
- Business Week
- Fast Company
- Business 2.0
- Inc.
- Entrepreneur
- Strategy + Business
