UX Bookmobile on Parade

Your friendly neighborhood UX Bookmobile is hitting the road, visiting Amsterdam for Interaction (February 5-8), and San Diego for the Information Architecture Summit (March ). Please stop by and say hello, thumb through our paperbacks, and buy them (ebooks as well) at a deep discount. (And no shipping to boot!)

By the way, the UX Bookmobile happens to be perhaps the world’s cheapest, hokiest, and all-time GREATEST USER RESEARCH PLATFORM. There, the secret is now officially out.

Introducing the (new and improved) Rosenverse

Hello friends,

Lou Rosenfeld here, founder and publisher at Rosenfeld Media. If you know me, you know I’m always chasing the next big idea—sometimes to the point of driving my team a little nuts. But today, I’m thrilled to announce something that’s been a long time coming: the launch of the Rosenverse.

So what’s the Rosenverse?

It’s our all-in-one platform that brings together everything Rosenfeld Media has to offer: books, conference recordings, podcasts, live events, discounts, and more. It’s designed for UX and product professionals who want on-demand access to the best resources, events, and people in our field—all in one place.

We’ve listened to your feedback, pored over your suggestions, tore up the beta version, and rebuilt the Rosenverse from the ground up. Here’s what you’ll find:

• A unified experience: All our content—live, recorded, and published—is now accessible from a single, easy-to-use platform. Whether you’re looking for the latest book, a past conference session, or a community call, it’s all right here.
• Rosenbot—the best little chatbot in UX: Meet your new AI-powered research assistant. Rosenbot is trained only on the high-quality content you’ve come to expect from us: our latest books (we publish 8-10 new titles annually), around 1,000 conference and community sessions, and more. The Rosenbot is ready to help you find answers, spark ideas, and support your professional development.
• Fresh content, all the time: We’re adding new community call recordings every month and producing four conferences a year. Gold subscribers get access to all past conference content—including session recordings, notes, sketchnotes, and decks—plus automatic access to new conference content 90 days after each event.
• Community at the core: Join our 14K+ member Slack workspace to connect with peers, get support, and share feedback. We’ve made it easier than ever to collaborate, learn, and grow together.
• Exclusive perks: Gold members enjoy substantial discounts on Rosenfeld books, conferences, and workshops. If you’re serious about your UX journey, this is the best way to stay ahead.

Great content is only as valuable as the conversations it sparks and the community it supports. The new Rosenverse isn’t just about access—it’s about engagement, collaboration, and building a space where UX and product professionals can learn from each other and push our industry forward.

We’re not stopping here. Your feedback will continue to shape the Rosenverse. Join our Slack channels, attend our events, and let us know what you want to see next. We’re committed to making this the best resource for UX and product people—because that’s what you deserve.

Ready to dive in?

If you’ve been with us before, you’ll need to create a new account to access the new Rosenverse—even if you already have a Rosenfeld Media account. Don’t worry: your previously purchased ebooks are still yours to keep.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Let’s keep building, learning, and growing—together.

See you in the Rosenverse,

Lou

P.S. Keep an eye on your inbox for the Rosenfeld Report, our biweekly newsletter, for the latest updates, new releases, and curated UX insights from around the web.

DAISY format now available for all Rosenfeld titles

One way to get your arms around accessible design is to read a certain new book. Another is to work directly with the book’s authors. Thanks to Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery’s help (and gentle pressure), we now offer all Rosenfeld Media books in DAISY format.

What’s DAISY? It’s the digital talking book standard. DAISY is a way of formatting books so they can be read and navigated more easily by people who are blind, have low vision, or have learning disabilities.

DAISY books work on standalone devices or with reading software such as Kurzweil. People can listen to the book, read the book with enlarged print, or convert the text to Braille. Some DAISY reading tools provide advanced options to navigate the book, as well as support additional tasks like inserting notes and looking up definitions.

DAISY isn’t just available for Sarah and Whitney’s A Web for Everyone; as of now, you can log in to your Rosenfeld Media account and download all of your past purchases in DAISY format. 🙂

Analyzing the Research Behind User Research

Let’s be honest:  many organizations don’t know how to successfully do user research. Too often research gets treated like an item to knock off a checklist just before products get shipped out. Or it’s skipped altogether because “there’s just no time.” Even with good intentions, the lack of in-house expertise can stymie us. We end up conducting focus groups. Or approaching strangers in Starbucks–asking them how much they’d pay for our new product.

We researchers, designers, and product managers want to understand what makes great products that customers will buy, use and recommend to friends. But without research, this can feel impossible.

This is such a pervasive pain point that Rosenfeld Media has made user research the topic of our next virtual conference: User Research for Everyone. The goal: to help you figure out how to build a team that is excited about research and empower it with the tools to make research useful.

Before designing the program, I helped Lou conduct some research (obviously). Research on user research–yep, pretty meta. Almost 200 of you weighed in and told us the areas you struggle with most, and who you most want to learn from. The responses clustered nicely into six prevailing topics:

“How do I convince people research is important?”

Convincing leaders and teams to see the value of user research is the top question you submitted. We agree. Research works when everybody is on board, but making people care is challenging. Especially if you work in a large organization and need to persuade multiple stakeholders with competing agendas.

“How do I turn this research into better products?”

We’re often told to get out of the building and talk to users, but that can create a five-story pile of research. Distilling and choosing the right insights to inform product decisions is time consuming and daunting.

“How do I make sure everybody understands the research?”

Research can only inform design decisions if everybody on the team understands (and agrees on) the results. How many of you have created a 30-page deck that nobody ever looks at? Many of you said you’re eager to discover more compelling ways to share and evangelize research that people want to absorb and use.

“How can we do this faster and cheaper?”

Most of you face real budget or time constraints–making research seem like a pipe dream. But it doesn’t have to stop us from learning from users. A lot of respondents want techniques for doing remote research to cut costs, or to shorten the timeframe to work better in an agile environment. Luckily, there are a lot of tools and tactics available these days to help make good research achievable and affordable for any budget.

“How do I pick which research to do?”

Many of you have difficulty picking the right methodology to answer your questions. Even experienced researchers can struggle to understand how to incorporate quantitative data into the research process. Many of you request better frameworks for deciding which research to do when.

“How do I get more participants?”

Even when you’ve got a good understanding of who your users are, there’s still the challenge of getting them to talk to you. This can be especially tough when you’re in the early days of a product development and don’t yet have real users. In established companies, you need to coax sales or marketing people to let you talk to customers. There are better ways to reach the right users without resorting to begging or bribery.

Getting to Answers

Join us on October 11, where we’ll tackle these important questions with the experts you requested most: Abby Covert, Steve Krug, Erika Hall, Nate Bolt, Leah Buley, Cindy Alvarez, Julie Stanford and me (as moderator). The program includes opportunities with every expert–so you can ask your most top-of-mind questions.

Buy a ticket for yourself–or your team and build the user research toolkit you’ve wanted. Your ticket also gives you unlimited access to downloads and replays of the full program in case you can’t make it.

Thanks to all of you who participated in the survey. Hope to see you there! And hit us up with any questions and thoughts below.

Laura Klein is a Lean UX and Research expert in Silicon Valley who teaches companies how to get to know their users and build products people will love. She’s a Rosenfeld Media expert and author of UX for Lean Startups (O’Reilly). Her newest book, Build Better Products, comes out in late 2016. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her blog and podcast at Users Know.

“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.

Help us test EPUB format?

Like just about every publisher, we’re grappling with working out our ebook publishing strategy. Many of you have expressed interest in the EPUB format, an open standard that can be read on iPhones and Sony Readers.

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Our first book in EPUB format…

…is now available! Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting can now be read on your iPhone, Sony Reader, Android, or… who knows what else! These ebook sands seem to shift hourly! In any case, we optimized the design for Stanza, and checked on Bookworm and ADE, so it should work fine in most cases.

And best of all, you can’t beat the price: US$5. So download a copy now, and please comment here on how this first effort might be improved.

(Kindle owners, why are we leaving you out? Well, our books have full color interiors and complex layouts; the Kindle isn’t good at presenting that kind of content, at least not yet. But Amazon recently purchased the company that developed Stanza, the primary EPUB reader, so perhaps that’ll change soon.)

The future: now 25% off!

Many of you have brightened many a day here at Rosenfeld Media headquarters by asking if you could subscribe to our books. Well, here’s our bad news/good news response.

First, the bad news: we can’t offer you a new book, like clockwork, every quarter or month—we simply don’t which books will be coming out when. Authors are just that way.

Now the good—no, great—news: as of today, you can purchase the next four books we publish right now, at a 25% discount. We don’t know which books those will be—but there will be books. In fact, as of this moment, we have a cool dozen in the pipeline, and anticipate publishing five of them in 2011.

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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.

Interview with UX Expert Steve Krug

We’re thrilled to have Steve Krug speaking at our upcoming conference, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!

This week we pick Steve’s brain about UX tactics and DIY Usability. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You’ve always been a big proponent of DIY Usability, i.e. the fact that it’s not rocket science so anyone should be able to do it. We understand anyone can do it, but does that mean they can do it well?

Steve Krug: Actually, my trademarked slogan is “It’s not rocket surgery,”™ but why quibble? You’re right: it does mean I believe that most people—with a little instruction&#8212can do much of what I do as a usability consultant. They can’t do it as well as I can—hopefully&#8212because I’ve been doing it for 25 years, but a lot of it is just applying common sense.

And that’s particularly true for running some basic usability tests. Someone with experience–especially a professional–can probably do a better job than an amateur. But can an amateur do it well? In my experience, almost anyone can do at least a halfway decent job right away. After all, it mostly consists of just giving someone a task (or tasks) to do using whatever you’re building, and then watching them while keeping them thinking aloud.

In fact, the hardest part for beginners is biting their tongue and resisting the impulse to help, to comment, and to ask leading questions.

RM: But does this mean they can do it well enough to make it worthwhile?

SK: I think so, for a few reasons.

First, someone beginning to do DIY testing probably hasn’t been doing any testing before, and some testing is infinitely better than none.

Second, if they haven’t been doing any testing, then there are probably huge usability problems just waiting to be found. So even if the facilitation is less than perfect, the participant is still going to run into the worst problems and the observers are going to see them.

And finally, I’ve been asking people for years to send me examples of cases where testing by amateurs made a product worse. And after all this time, I haven’t had anyone send me a convincing example. In fact, most of the examples I’ve received have been where supposed professionals did a shoddy job. It makes sense that these are the ones I get, because professionals are—correctly&#8212held to a higher standard.
So I guess my answer is that amateurs may not do a perfect job, but they almost always do it more than well enough.

RM: If anyone can do it themselves, when would you need an expert or consultant to come in and help?

SK: I’ve always said that if you can afford to hire a professional, by all means do it. It’s just that the vast majority of the people out there developing “stuff”—sites, apps, etc.&#8212can’t afford to hire someone. That’s why I’m always trying to teach people how to do it themselves.

But if you have any money for it, I’d highly recommend at least hiring a professional to do two things:

1. An expert review. Having a pro look at your stuff and apply their years of experience is enormously valuable. In particular, they’re likely to have a lot of knowledge about what’s worth fixing, and what kinds of fixes will actually work. It’s a great investment.

2. Coaching. Even if you’re doing DIY testing, it’s great to have someone with experience looking over your shoulder and mentoring while you get started. They can help you formulate task scenarios, show you ways to recruit participants, observe your sessions and critique your facilitation skills, and decide what to fix and how to fix it.

Like I said, professionals are going to be better at it than you are. But if you can’t afford to have one around all the time, get them to teach you.

RM: Thanks, Steve!

There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Steve along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.