Register for a workshop, get $350 Loop11 project!

There’s yet another awesome deal for attendees for our Spring 2012 UX Workshops!

When you register for our workshops you’ll receive a free project (with no limits on tasks and questions) from our sponsor, Loop11, to conduct your own online usability study (normally priced at $350).

Here are the details:

• You’ll get quantitative usability metrics based on hundreds of participants
• You’ll know whether your users can complete they key tasks they come to your website for
• You’ll find where there are usability problems with your website

What you’ll get with Loop11:

• One full scale project with no limit on the number tasks and questions
• Up to 1,000 participants

This offer is good when you register for any of our spring workshops: Mountain View (March 5-7), Washington DC (May 7-9), and New York (May 23-25).

Thanks, Loop11!

Rachel Hinman’s The Mobile Frontier is now on sale

We’re overjoyed to report that Rachel Hinman’s much-anticipated book is now available! Here’s the blurb:

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is ripe with opportunities to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. The Mobile Frontier will help you navigate this unfamiliar and fast-changing landscape, and inspire you to explore the possibilities that mobile technology presents.

If the testimonials from folks like Josh Clark and Luke Wroblewski don’t grab you, check out what readers are already saying nice things about the book.

Also peruse the table of contents, FAQ, the 390 illustrations, and an excerpt that UX Magazine has kindly published. They’re also giving away five free copies in an oh-so-easy-to-enter contest.

We hope you’ll enjoy The Mobile Frontier; please let us know what you think!

Mental Models webinar this Thursday (December 11)

Want more mental models? Author Indi Young will teach Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy this Thursday, December 11, at 1pm EST.
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New book: Tomer Sharon’s Validating Product Ideas

One thing that you’ll immediately notice about our newest book—Tomer Sharon’s Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research—is that it’s so danged practical. To create the book, Tomer used a radically simple (and practical) recipe:

1. Interview hundreds of startup founders and project managers about the questions that keep them up at night
2. Group them into nine critical questions (e.g., “Do people want the product?” and “Which design generates better results?”)
3. Guide readers through a few quick and inexpensive user research methods that actually answer each of those critical questions

The results are fantastically useful for anyone who is struggling to reduce risk and increase product success.

In other words, lean user research meets product management.

BOOM!

In some respects, this book—our 24th!—is a return to our practical, “here’s how you do it” roots. In another sense, it wasn’t written for UX people at all. Tomer, like so many of us, wants to democratize what many UX people already know. So if you’re a product manager or developer, this book is most definitely for you. But if you’re steeped in user research methods, you’ll still appreciate Tomer’s help in doing what you’ve already been doing: sharing the UX good news with the people you work with.

Like every Rosenfeld Media book, Validating Product Ideas comes in four-color paperback and four DRM-free ebook formats (ePUB, MOBI, PDF, and DAISY). Enjoy!

5 books for the price of 4

Happy news!

If you have four books in your Rosenfeld Media shopping cart, you can add one more… free! No discount code necessary—just add the fifth book (in the same format—paperback or digital) and our cart will automatically figure out not to charge you extra. (If you’d rather use a discount code, please do, but you can’t do both.) It’s that simple.

No, there are no strings attached. We just like you. And we want to you to enjoy more Rosenfeld Media books.

Bill Scott’s Interface Engineering webinar now on sale

Last month, Bill Scott taught an excellent Future Practice webinar, “What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering”. He really nailed the topic, and you can see from his interview that he has a knack for getting a great discussion going. The 76-minute DRM-free webinar recording is now on sale; watch and listen on your iPhone or with dozens of your closest colleagues at your next company brown bag.

Next webinar up is on sustainable design, March 25, with Nathan Shedroff.

Bruce Lee, I need your help

Updated, September 13: The winner of our August book: Nate Burgos (@designfeast) for sending support Steve Portigal’s way. Finish that book, Steve; thanks Nate!

Imagine trying to have a long, detailed conversation with a stranger that you’ll never meet. The stranger may be far away from you—in time as well as in distance. Worse, you have to squeeze your conversation into the tiny open spaces you have between your professional and personal obligations.

Now you know why writing a book is so hard, even for a successful, experienced author like Sunni Brown:

As of this moment, there are 17 authors working on new Rosenfeld Media books (we’ll announce one more very soon). All of our authors could use some encouragement, and you can help. Here’s how:

Choose one of our books-in-progress. Then tweet why you’re looking forward to their book. If you can, include the author’s twitter ID (here’s a list). And include the hash tag #RMgo. Here are two examples:

Getting nervous about lawsuits: really need that web accessibility book from @whitneyq & @gradualclearing. #RMgo (that’s 112 characters)

Loved @ugleah’s UX team of one workshop; could really use the book! #RMgo (73 characters)

Do it as many times as you like. Each tweet will serve as your entry into a monthly free book-giveaway. We’ll announce winners on the @rosenfeldmedia Twitter feed and in our newsletter, the Rosenfeld Review. It’s that simple.

Thanks for your help!

Community Videoconference: Leading through the long tail of trauma

Please join our free Advancing Research community or Enterprise Experience community for access to the recording. You’ll receive a welcome email with a Dropbox link to our archive of past calls. 

The fatigue and trauma from events of the past few years has affected many of us – not just personally, but also professionally, and at the organizational level as well. For the most part, the corporate world has recognized the impact these past years have had on employees and teams. However, many organizations have only recently become aware of the longer-term effects and are struggling to support their people as they work through the long tail of trauma

In this special community call, produced in partnership by Rosenfeld Media’s Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience curation teams, Uday Gajendar will facilitate a discussion about the long tail of trauma, with Rachael Dietkus, LCSW, Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW, and Dr. Dawn Emerick.

They will cover:
• What it means to be a “trauma-informed leader”
• Ideas to keep in mind when handling stressful/anxious events or circumstances with your team
• Differences in supporting people during an event and its immediate aftermath, vs in the long tail of trauma
• Specific actions you can take with your team

Please register to join us via Zoom on July 13th at 11am ET and learn more about the long tail of trauma, how it can affect your organization, and what steps you can take toward a sustained and intentional strategy for leading your team through long-term, post-pandemic challenges. The panel will be recorded, but we will turn off the recording for audience Q&A.

The speakers:

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

Rachael is a macro-focused clinical social worker focusing on trauma-conscious practices in design. She is the founder and Chief Compassion Officer for Social Workers Who Design, a consultancy focused on integrating ethical understanding and trauma-conscious approaches in design. She is a two-time alumna of UIUC, where she studied Sociology and Social Work.

Dr. Dawn Emerick

Dr. Dawn Emerick is a speaker, trainer, and coach, focused on trauma-informed leadership. She’s a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a 2021 TEDx Jacksonville speaker, and host of the Leadership Uncensored podcast. Over a span of 30 years, she crafted her leadership, organizational development, and engagement skills at various private, government, and non-profit organizations in Florida, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and Texas.

Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW

Dawn Shedrick, LCSW-R, is the founder and CEO of JenTex Training & Consulting, a professional development company that offers continuing education training; leadership development training and coaching; and consulting to the human services, healthcare, and social justice sectors. Dawn has also designed and delivered mental and emotional wellness and LGBTQ inclusion seminars in corporate workplaces including Travelers Insurance, JP Morgan Chase, GE, The NY Mets, Office Depot, GlaxoSmithKline, National Grid, Columbia University, and Canon USA North American Headquarters. She has delivered trainings to in-person audiences throughout the United States and abroad in Canada, Puerto Rico, Tanzania, and China and has created interactive virtual learning events for global audiences.

Uday Gajendar (Co-curator, Enterprise Experience Community)

Uday is a Design Manager for Aurora Solar who specializes in next-gen innovation projects and “three-in-a-box” product development with business and engineering leads. He also regularly writes for ACM Interactions and speaks worldwide on design topics at SXSW, UX Australia, IxDA, Midwest UX, and other venues. You can read Uday’s thoughts on design at his blog and on Medium.

Enterprise flUX: the evolving practice (and conference) of enterprise user experience

In a nutshell: The 2019 edition of the Enterprise UX conference will focus on two new use cases: 1) helping UX leaders and managers more effectively partner with their peers in product management, CX and other parts of the enterprise that share responsibility for delivering great experiences; and 2) helping enterprise UX practitioners up-level their skillsets to become “enterprise-ready”. To keep up with our program’s progress, join our Enterprise UX community mailing list.

What’s the use case for a conference?

That may seem like an odd question, but conferences are like any other product—they need a reason to exist. Given their annual nature, you really need to be asking this question every year, especially in a field evolving as quickly as user experience design. That’s hard to do, especially when the wheels of conference production must begin turning well in advance, sometimes more than a year before the event takes place.

That’s why we’re making some significant enhancements to the 2019 program to stay relevant.

Enterprise UX 2018 was the fourth edition of the conference and, in many respects, we really hit our stride: a user research-driven program, exciting and diverse speakers making polished presentations, and a well-choreographed production.

But the 2018 program repeated many of the same themes as our inaugural program back in 2015. While those themes remained relevant, the industry has changed in important ways over those four years. So we’ve begun planning a new program to match the community’s evolving needs.

From one use case to two

Like the good UX folks that we are, we started with the conference’s use case. The inaugural use case looked something like this:

The Enterprise UX conference provides content and community to UX leaders and managers who are trying to build—and sustain—UX teams within large enterprises.

The future is famously here but unevenly distributed: since 2015, many of those leaders and managers have succeeded in getting their UX teams established, staffed, and funded. They no longer have to constantly look over their shoulders and worry about regime change, activist investors, and other threats that have decapitated design orgs in the past. UX is now irrevocably a part of the DNA of many—if not most—enterprises.

Rather than managing up to get a seat at the table, UX leaders and managers now need to shift their focus: managing down (building the right teams) and managing laterally (collaborating with peers from other parts of the enterprise). Ergo, two new use cases for Enterprise UX 2019:

The Enterprise UX conference provides content and community to UX leaders and managers who need to:
1) Help their teams acquire the skills they need to succeed in the face of enterprise challenges; and
2) Understand, align, coordinate, and collaborate with peers in other parts of the organization that impact the user’s experience.

Use case #1: Managing down

It’s no secret that the supply of UX talent simply can’t keep up with demand. And perhaps the biggest driver of that demand is the growth of teams at large enterprises.

This results in placing fairly inexperienced practitioners—many fresh out of short-term programs like General Assembly’s—into settings rife with complex political, cultural, and historical challenges. These practitioners maybe be strong craftspeople, but don’t have the business acumen and soft skills to succeed in an enterprise setting.

To become “enterprise-ready,” these practitioners desperately need to expand their toolkits, and it’ll take more than a single conference to get them there. But acknowledging the need in a public setting is an important first step. Enterprise UX 2019 will offer a variety of workshops to help practitioners become better at the listening, collaborating, negotiating, empathizing, understanding, and partnering skills they need to create and sustain great experiences at enterprise scale.

Use case #2: Managing laterally

In enterprises—large, distributed, and deeply complex—the user experience can’t be owned by UX teams; at best, we’re its shepherds. UX leaders and managers realize that they need to understand, serve, and partner with peers in all the other parts of the enterprise that impact the users’ experience, whether employees or customers. That means learning the goals, motivations, challenges, perspectives, and—perhaps most importantly—the language of people in HR, sales, CX, engineering, innovation labs, analytics, and the C-suite.

We envision an Enterprise UX 2019 program that takes the bull by the horns, teaching UX leaders and managers how their peers think, feel, and act, and modeling ways—through panels, storytelling, group exercises, and other means—to combine forces to create better experiences for enterprise users.

Diversity of the multidimensional variety

At Enterprise UX 2018, we made huge strides in diversifying our speaker roster. The key to reaching underrepresented communities was acknowledging that we, the program curators (Uday Gajendar, Lada Gorlenko, Dave Malouf, and me) lived and worked in a detached, self-reinforcing network made up of people just like ourselves. The only way to reach beyond it was to let go: to delegate a share of our programming to people who inhabited very different networks. It’s never easy to give up control, but the outcome was well worth the risk.

For 2019, we face a similar task. In addition to reaching underrepresented communities, we also need to reach beyond UX to our “sister” enterprise silos that impact the experience. We’ll start with these siblings:

• Customer experience (CX)
• Product management
• Engineering
• Data analytics

Cross-disciplinary diversity in our program will require a similar approach: adding well-connected members of those communities to our curation team and empowering them to take substantial roles in programming. These ambassadors will help us understand the landscapes of their respective communities in terms of potential speakers but, more importantly, the goals and challenges they face when it comes to crafting successful enterprise experiences.

Is it still Enterprise UX?

Most definitely. But the past five years have made it clear that enterprise UX is not owned by the UX team—it’s owned by the enterprise. To make the conference a home for anyone involved with the enterprise experience, we’re considering changing the conference’s name to something more inclusive—perhaps simply “Enterprise Experience”.

While the name is important, the program and the people it serves are what matter most. If you’d like to keep up on our progress and let us know what kind of program you would like to see, please subscribe to our Enterprise UX community mailing list. That’s where we’ve already been sharing resources, ideas, and discussions about Enterprise UX for many months now, mostly in the form of free monthly videoconference calls. I hope you’ll join us and be part of the discussion!

Happy birthday, UX Book Clubs!

Two years old. And, according to the UX Book Club wiki, over 100 clubs around the world. From Portland to Perth, chances are there’s a UX Book Club near you where you can discuss books, network, and have a great time. And if there isn’t? Then start one; it’s incredibly easy.

To help mark the occasion, we’re donating five of our books to the UX Book Clubs’ birthday contest. To enter, tweet the reason you love the UXBC and include the hash tag #uxbookclub2. Do it by November 24.

And while we’re on the subject, remember that publishers like us are more than happy to give free stuff and discounts to clubs that discuss our books.