This week only: Summer Book Blowout

You’ll be pleased to know that all Rosenfeld Media paperbacks and Two Waves paperbacks are 15% to 50% off this week (through 11:59pm EDT Saturday, August 11) when you purchase directly from us. Don’t miss out!

Summer is one of the four best seasons for stocking up your UX library. (And, if you’re Down Under, so is winter.)

Announcing a new conference: The Business Case for Design

Justifying design and research is the top challenge that comes up in our user research at Rosenfeld Media. We want to help you get over that hump, so we’ve put together The Business Case for Design, a one-day virtual conference that takes place Tuesday, July 31 (10am-5pm EDT).

Six industry leaders will share a rich set of perspectives on how to effectively make the case for design:

1. Nutanix founder Dheeraj Pandey will share a CEO’s perspective on what business leaders need to know about the value of design
2. Customer Experience guru Kerry Bodine will share case studies of how service design creates business value by focusing on your customers’ ecosystems
3. Jeff Sauro, author of Quantifying User Experience, will show you scientific methods for using data to drive and justify design decisions
4. Innovator JD Buckley will model how to demonstrate the ROI of your design work based on a case study from ADP
5. Author and design educator Nathan Shedroff will help you tap hidden opportunities to create and grow relationships with your customers with a set of new design-centric tools
6. Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering, will arm you with strategies to use design to set you apart from your competitors

At the end of each session, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. Bring your whole team for a shared learning experience, or attend solo in your PJs—after all, it’s a virtual conference! And you can listen to the session recordings at your own convenience—they’re included in the price of your ticket.

Save up to US$100 if you register by the end of the day this Friday, June 29. I hope you’ll join us July 31 for the Business Case for Design!

Join our team

We’re hiring a Marketing Manager! It’s a full-time gig—here in Brooklyn, NY, USA—with benefits, flexible work hours, lovely co-workers, and incredibly interesting challenges. Please peruse/share the posting.

Talking DesignOps

You might know that, last November, Rosenfeld Media hosted the first conference dedicated to discussing design operations. The DesignOps Summit sold out, and we’re now planning a second edition for this fall in the US northeast.

You might not know that we’ve organized a free monthly conference call to keep the DesignOps discussion going. We’ve held two, and our last one had 60 participants. Next one is February 15, 4-5pm ET. We’d love to have you join us too; email [email protected] to request an invitation.

New book: Living in Information by Jorge Arango

Happy day; our newest book, Jorge Arango’s Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, just launched! You might already be familiar with Jorge’s writing; he co-authored the 4th edition of the polar bear book with Peter Morville and me.

Jorge’s background is in architecture and—not surprisingly—his book is structured around the concept of designing places, rather than products and services. As an information architecture guy, I’m really excited by this metaphor; it opens up whole new possibilities in how we understand what we’re designing. We already have a whole vocabulary around place; it’s time we applied it to our design process and saw ourselves as placemakers. Really, we have no choice—as Jorge points out, we are already literally living in information. And i’s up to us to own that responsibility, as recent events make clear.

I hope you’ll enjoy Living in Information. It’s our latest book on our Two Waves imprint and—like all of our books—is available in PDF, ePUB, MOBI, DAISY, and a lovely color-illustrated paperback printed on high-quality paper in the USA.

User research and diversity

We’ve been hard at work changing our conference curation process to create more diverse speaker rosters—for Enterprise UX 2018 (June 13-15, San Francisco), and soon for the second DesignOps Summit (New York City). Guess what? It all comes down to user research.

Help Defend Net Neutrality This Giving Tuesday

Update—November 29, 2017: thanks to you, we sold 77 books on Giving Tuesday—and raised US$385 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation! Thank you very much!

Back in the late 1980s, when I was a student in library school, we debated what the dawning “information superhighway” should be. Some classmates saw it as a huge boon to the global economy. Others argued that “information wants to be free,” and money shouldn’t taint public access to the Internet’s information bounty.

I’ve worked at both ends of the spectrum—as a librarian and as a publisher—and have always taken the middle road: “Information doesn’t want to be free–it just wants to be used.” Although the pendulum has swung back and forth, we’ve managed to find a middle road that works well enough for most of us.

Until now.

It all may change in the US if the FCC’s proposed changes to Net Neutrality are approved.

Companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T would likely transform their policies from customer-unfriendly to completely hostile to the free and open exchange of information. It could jeopardize your career, your kids’ education, free speech, independent journalism, and just about every aspect of contemporary life.

That’s why this Giving Tuesday—Rosenfeld Media is donating US$5 for every book purchased to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Please consider making a purchase—or simply donate to the EFF directly.

I’ll leave you with links to learn about Net Neutrality and the FCC’s proposed order from two of our great nation’s most trusted and respected sources: the American Library Association and The Oatmeal. Please read them and spread the word. Thank you.

Happy birthday to us!

It’s hard for me to believe that Rosenfeld Media turns 12 today. To celebrate, I thought about ordering brownies from Zingerman’s (my favorite bakery in the world). But hey, it’s more fun to share your birthday with friends.

Here are two sweet ways to celebrate the day from wherever you are…

Enter to win a free library pack. Yup, that’s literally the complete set of Rosenfeld Media ebooks (over 30 books) for your personal or team library. Here’s how:

1. Tweet your answer to this question:  What one book do you wish someone would write for you, right now?
2. Tag @RosenfeldMedia and add hashtag #Happy12thRM

3. Tweet it out before midnight PST today, October 31st
4. We’ll announce the results on hashtag #Happy12thRM

Get 12% off all books in our stores today. Use the Happy12thRM code to stock up on classic design and UX titles, learn how to select the right technologies for your team, or boost your business and leadership skills.

We’re so thankful for your support over the years. And hope our books, trainings, conferences continue to help you grow and succeed.

What’s DesignOps?

The upcoming DesignOps Summit isn’t just a conference—we’re looking at it as a way to help define what design operations means. Read all about it (Lou Rosenfeld in Medium). And learn more with this lovely resource list compiled by Melissa McGrath.

What’s Impacting Your Work in Enterprise UX?

If you work in Enterprise UX, would you take our 3-minute user research survey below? We’re gathering an industry look into what pressing topics and trends impact your UX work in the enterprise.

Your Input Will Shape the Next EUX Conference. Literally.

If you check out the programs for past Enterprise UX conferences (here’s 2017’s, 2016’s, and 2015’s), you’ll see that we invest a hell of lot of effort in designing it. Dave Malouf, Uday Gajendar, Lada Gorlenko, and I will use the survey results to tailor the 2018 conference to the topics that you want most.

One out of every ten respondents will be randomly selected to receive a free Rosenfeld Media ebook. To enter, please respond below by September 29.

We’ll share the results in a later post so that you can see what top topics are trending right now. Thanks in advance for helping!