Testing the design of the book
How would you test the design of a book?
Not the content, but the quality of a book as a functioning information system?
It’s a strange question—the book, after all, has been around for centuries, and its design is fairly stable. Conventions exist to guide what goes on the covers, the spine, the pages, and so on. Readers expect tables of contents, an index, chapters, sections, and pagination.
But it doesn’t hurt to look for ways of carrying out those conventions more effectively. And maybe there is room for innovation when it comes to book design?
As a fledgling publisher, one focused on user experience design, Rosenfeld Media is trying to answer these questions. Our first manuscript, Indi Young’s book on mental models, is going into production, and we’re hoping to publish it late this summer. We’ve already designed the interiors—both print and PDF versions—for our initial series, based on a fair bit of market research (detailed here, here, and here). Now it’s time to test those designs, and we could really use your help.
We’ve started crafting our test questions (listed below), but have a long way to go. It’s especially unclear how to test for such qualities as readability and credibility. We’re also sure that we’ve left out some important questions. Your suggestions would go a long way toward helping us provide you with better books.
Two new UX events for spring 2013
p>While we’ve been hosting UX workshops for years, we’ll doing something different in 2013—we’re experimenting with some exciting new formats for educating UX professionals.
First up is a very deep dive into a critical topic—our first Responsive Design Studio, which takes place in New York City, April 29-May 1. This three-day course is literally interdisciplinary by design, conceived and taught by a dream team of authors: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, content strategist and author of Content Everywhere, Jason Cranford Teague, designer and author of CSS3 Visual Quickstart Guide, and Aaron Gustafson, developer and author of Adaptive Web Design. Each will lead a day and be on hand to “interpret” the other days. If you need to get up to speed on responsive design, this is the course for you—even more so for your team. The early bird deadline is March 30, so please register soon!
Next up is May 29, and the location is your office (or living room or yacht): 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips, a one-day virtual event co-hosted with our friends at Environments for Humans. We grabbed six incredible experts: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Whitney Quesenbery, and Jeffrey Eisenberg, and asked them to provide some awesomely practical advice. They came up with 31 in all, and each nugget will directly improve your user experience practice. Tickets are available for both individuals and teams; hope you’ll spend the day with us.
We’re working on putting together some other new workshops,a and we might be taking the Responsive Design Studio on the road later this year. Best way to keep up with our plans is to follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our free newsletter, the Rosenfeld Review. Thanks!
Welcome
I’ve been planning Rosenfeld Media for about five months, and blogged the news of its impending arrival some time ago. But launching the RM site makes everything feel real, permanent, and somehow “official”.
Hello world!
It’s been a pleasure getting to the point, especially working with Bright Creative’s Dave Shea to develop this site. Please kick the tires and let us know what you think. And please feel free to spread the word.
We’re hiring a Marketing Manager
Certainly, this is exciting news for us; maybe for you too?
This is a new position, with flexible hours. We expect it to eventually grow into a full-time gig. And you’d get to help define it as the job—and the company—change.
We don’t post job openings every day, so I’m sure we’ve forgotten to include something. Feel free to post questions below in the comments section. Or… go ahead and apply. We’d love a cover letter and a resume by Friday, January 4. Thanks!
Position Opening: Marketing Manager at Rosenfeld MediaThe Job
Rosenfeld Media is the premier provider of books, training, consulting, and other expertise-based services to the growing community of user experience design professionals. We are a small company, but our brand is well-known and respected in the user experience (UX) community, and many of the UX field’s leading lights write our books, consult for our clients, and teach our courses. We seek a strong communicator to help us broaden our visibility and deepen our engagement within that community.
This is a half-time position (20 hours/week) with flexible hours; as our company grows, we expect it to become a full-time position. Because this is a new position, and the company and its market are changing, the person we hire will have a great opportunity to help define the position itself.
The position’s initial responsibilities include:
- Helping develop and execute our regular promotional activities (for example, creating and posting newsletters, blog postings, tweets, and book contests)
- Developing new, engaging ways to promote our people, products, and services
- Working with partners (e.g., sponsors, magazines, and conferences) to develop and carry-out joint promotions
The Approach
We use the term “marketing” loosely. While we value, respect, and—when appropriate—utilize traditional marketing approaches and methods, our brand’s success is built on conversation and curation. Conversation means listening to and engaging with our community, and curation means providing uniquely valuable content to the community. The Marketing Manager will continue to intensify our ongoing efforts to communicate with and curate for our community.
Skills and Experience
The candidate:
- Is a strong communicator who can listen, talk, and write in a compelling way
- Can work independently and remotely, tackling discrete projects while managing ongoing tasks
- Has a flexible schedule
- Generates and tries new ideas, makes and admits mistakes, and learns from them
- Can demonstrate relevant success in past positions
The ideal candidate:
- Is familiar with (or has demonstrated curiosity in) the field of user experience design
- Has experience marketing and promoting expertise-based products and services (e.g., books, training, and/or consulting)
- Has experience with at least some marketing and social media tools (currently, we rely upon MovableType, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Twitter, and Hootsuite)
- Yet knows that tool use is only one of many means to achieving success
- Has a bachelor’s degree in communications, marketing, or a related field
- Is located in the New York City metropolitan area
How to Apply
Please submit your resume and a cover letter using our form by January 4, 2013.
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!
What’s New: Digital Reality Checks Series
Big news today: Rosenfeld Media is launching a new line of books called Digital Reality Checks! They’re designed to help all kinds of digital professionals—not just from the UX tribe, but IT, marketing folks, and others—make sense of the expensive, often overhyped software tools that large organizations depend upon.
The first one in the series—Theresa Regli’s Digital and Marketing Asset Management—is now available for purchase. Oh my god: digital asset management has become a huge problem in almost every organizational setting, and I’m thrilled to help address it. Buy it in paperback or ebook from our store or Amazon.
Future Digital Reality Checks books will cover similar challenges, like web content management and marketing automation. Expect to see 6-8 of titles over the next couple years.
You might be scratching your head a bit. “Digital professionals” don’t necessarily sound like people focused on UX. Or you might find these topics a bit unfamiliar and technical.
But we’ve already noticed that you are changing. The kinds of people who read our books and attend our conferences are no longer purely UX folks by any stretch, and interests are bleeding together.
For example, one of the most popular themes at both Enterprise UX 2015 and 2016 conferences was design systems. People are clamoring for better tools to support creating better experiences that scale well in large organizations. In many cases, the outcome is dependent upon the efforts of all sorts of “digital professionals;” in other cases, those professionals are the beneficiaries of strong design systems. As Peter Morville would say, they’re all intertwingled.
This shouldn’t be surprising, and it’s nothing new: disparate tribes came under the UX umbrella years ago. We’re only going to see more convergence, bigger umbrellas, and the sunset of disciplinary tribalism. I’m not fan of tribes and priesthoods, so I find it thrilling!
And it’s exciting for me that Rosenfeld Media can play a small role in accelerating and strengthening those connections through our publishing and conference planning efforts, just as we have for UX. We’re so happy to help mix marketing and IT people into the pot. We’re stronger together.
I’m also thrilled to have a partner in all this: Tony Byrne and his team at Real Story Group, who are writing the Digital Reality Checks books. They’re a fiercely independent group of analysts that has taken a very no-bullshit approach to the enterprise software space—an area that’s typically marked by marketing hype and vendor/analyst conflicts of interest. Real Story Group’s analysts really are focused on understanding digital reality, and they take the same jargon-free, plain language-approach to their craft that we’ve used in Rosenfeld Media’s UX books.
Bottom line: a new line of books for for digital professionals that get at the real story of enterprise software tools. Digital and Marketing Asset Management today, and more to come. And even if it’s not up your alley at the moment, I’m pretty sure someone you work with will benefit from reading it. Please let them know about it.
PS We’re going to launch another new book series in the coming weeks called Two Waves Books. I’ll tell you more about that very soon…
Why We Fail: now on sale
Why did Twitter succeed while Pownce plotzed? Why has “to Plaxo” become a verb? And Zune: great product, but are you using one right now?
More and more, products succeed because not because they provide better designs or functionality, but because their overall experiences are superior to their competitors’. Victor Lombardi’s book, Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures, which debuted just hours ago, is your field guide to failure. It’s packed with case studies and lessons that will help you, as Don Norman suggests in his foreword, “embrace failure to learn from failure” and “learn from failure to avoid failure”.
Pick up your copy of Why We Fail direct from Rosenfeld Media today—in paperback and three DRM-free digital formats (PDF, MOBI, and ePUB). It’s also available from Amazon and O’Reilly.
“The single, most powerful communications tool you have”
That’s a quote from Andy Goodman in a talk on storytelling as a way to communicate the value of a non-profit’s work. It’s the story of changing a presentation from facts, figures and tiny print to a story. It’s not that facts and figures aren’t important. Or that you don’t have to have the data to back up your work. It’s that you need to start with something that lets the audience understand the result before you launch into how you got there.
The story he tells is about an organization that changes the lives of young people through their programs. But it could just as easily be about how a new design idea will change the experience.
How often have you heard a presentation that started with something like “if we deploy a new content management system with semantic tagging, we can enable a fully personalized experience”?
There’s a place for discussing the technologies and techniques that make our ideas possible. But, if you are trying to explore a new idea, start with a story about the world it will create. Once the audience is excited about the idea, you can back up and talk about what it will take to make the idea happen.
Goodman’s newsletter, free-range thinking, has a report on a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. It compared the impact of two charitable appeals. One started with facts and figures, the other with the story of one child.
Which one would appeal more to you?
One:
Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children. In Zambia, severe rainfall de?cits have resulted in a 42 percent drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated three million Zambians face hunger.
Four million Angolans–one third of the population–have been forced to ?ee their homes. More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.
Two:
Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa. Rokia is desperately poor and faces a threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support and the support
of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed her, and provide her with education, as well as basic medical care and hygiene education.
In the study, the second was more effective. People who saw the Rokia’s story (and a photo) donated almost twice as much money. A story – a recognizable person to donate to – is more compelling than what the authors call “statistical victims.”
This sounds a lot like what makes personas work. Even though a persona is a composite person rather than a single, real, example, the principle is the same: It’s easier to connect to a story than to statistics.
- See the video of Andy Goodman’s speech
- Read Sympathy and Callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victim, by Deborah Small, George Lowenstein, Paul Slovic
Special thanks to Ginny Redish for pointing me to this resource.
Redish and Kalbach webinar recordings now on sale
If you missed our last two live Future Practice webinars—Ginny Redish’s “Content as Conversation” or James Kalbach’s “Principles of Web Navigation”—fear not: both recordings are now on sale at US$69 each. These recordings have been edited and each runs approximately one hour long; and, like all of our digital products, they are free of DRM restrictions. Learn more and purchase here.
Speaking of webinars: next up is John Ferrara’s “Extending Game Design to Business Applications” scheduled for July 16 at 1pm EDT. Fascinating topic; please join us then!
Podcast: Changemakers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland discuss their new book
Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland join Lou to discuss their new book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, which comes out on January 17.
Get a taste of what they cover in the book, from systems thinking to navigating change, and how to look broadly at patterns to understand the context in which you are establishing change. The authors explain the wide range of industries they drew from in their research and interviews, as well as the highly emotional aspect of changemaking in society today. Bonus: they share some tools you can use to become a changemaker.
Maria recommends: The Knowledge Project podcast – interviews with an eclectic range of people. Host Shane Parrish is one of the best interviewers Maria has ever heard!
Christopher recommends: Non-profit Interact Project, which provides free design education to kids in underserved communities.
