Looking ahead to 2010
Like everyone else, we’re considering how we’d like the new year to be different than the last one. Following are the areas that we’re tackling right now. (I won’t call them “resolutions”—that just means plans, with little guaranty of actions.) We’d love your input: what’s missing from this list? And are we doing enough in each area?
Life and Death Design by Katie Swindler is available now!
Grab your copy of Life and Death Design: What Life-Saving Technology Can Teach Everyday UX Designers today!
Katie Swindler’s new book will help us redefine how we might view a core human function—specifically, the stress response—and how stress can be an informative tool for designers.
As an experienced presenter who has spoken on UX topics internationally at industry events, Katie believes that brands who wish to truly connect with consumers must expand utility through emotion. She illustrates how leveraging stress-informed design enables users to perform optimally during high-stress or traumatic experiences.
Important questions Katie tackles in her book include:
- How does understanding the stress response help designers deal with high-stress situations?
- How can designers leverage redundancy and biomimicry to enhance a final product?
- How stress-informed design can support experts in a way that preserves an organic workflow?
- How did conscientious attention to detail in design help save the lives of heroic users?
- What is “abusive design,” and how do we avoid it?
- And much, much more!
Life and Death Design contains these and many more fascinating examples that serve as beautifully counter-intuitive resources for designers. Life and Death Design is available to order!
Learn more about Katie here.
Josh Clark joins our editorial board
We are absolutely thrilled to have mobile design guru and author Josh Clark of Global Moxie join our editorial board. Like our other editorial advisors, Josh will be helping us identify potential authors and topics, and evaluate book proposals. So don’t be surprised if you notice, in a year or two, that we have a raft of great new mobile design books coming out. Welcome aboard, Josh!
Join us at The Advance Retreat
How can we foster an effective, open, enduring culture of design in our organizations?
One of the coolest things about my job is that I get to engage in constant conversations with design people about what’s interesting and important. Whether it’s books, events, or consulting services, people love to tell us what topics they want us to cover.
From those many conversations, I’ve concluded that one of the things UX people need most is… well, more conversations. Acquiring and refining nuts-and-bolts skills are important too, but how-to information is increasingly easy to come by. Productive conversation with peers isn’t.
So we’re trying something new: we’re launching the very first Advance Retreat. It’ll focus on answering a single question—one that more and more design leaders are struggling with: How can we foster an effective, open, enduring culture of design in our organizations?
That conversation oughta fill two days easy.
We’re producing the Advance Retreat with Marc Rettig and Hannah du Plessis of Fit Associates; they’re hugely experienced with this particular challenge. AND they are really, really good at facilitating conversations that lead to co-learning and co-creation. In other words, real outcomes. (I speak from experience; Fit’s help has moved Rosenfeld Media forward.)
The Advance Retreat is limited to 50 mid-late career design leaders, and you can apply to participate here. The Retreat may not be for you, but if your organization is larger than a startup, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that someone you work with could benefit greatly from participating. (Feel free to forward this PDF brochure their way.)
We’ll be meeting February 11-12 in Palm Springs. The very cool Ace Hotel is the ideal setting—both inside and out—for the kind of conversations we all need.
Questions or comments? Post them below. Or just go ahead and apply to be part of the conversation in the desert this February.
Future Practice Interview: Indi Young
As part of our new Future Practice webinar series, we’ll be interviewing presenters to give you a preview of what they’ll cover. Next up is author and Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young.
So You Want to Write a UX Book
We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think UX was a dynamic field, with enough subject matter to fill many books. Maybe you want to write one of those books yourself, but you’re daunted by the prospect. Understandable; a book is a formidable undertaking, especially on top of a full-time job, family, and other obligations. It also might just be the best thing you’ve ever done. Ready to take the leap? Some veteran RM authors offer tips that may help see you through the process and bring your book to its your ship date.
Write something every day (or nearly)
And keep track of your progress. While writing UX Team of One, Leah Buley jotted down each day’s work onto a big flip-chart calendar she kept in the kitchen. “I could look back and see when there were big chunks of time when I’d been writing diligently or when I’d simply been writing nothing. Each was motivating in its own way.” Sometimes she wrote on her CalTrain commute, happy to arrive at the office with the day’s writing already done.
Daily writing ignites momentum, and that, says Kevin Cheng, is “the only thing that matters.” Dabbling once a week, “it takes hours to get back into the swing,” says Cheng, author of See What I Mean. “When I started working daily, I could find myself with ten minutes before a bus came and still make noticeable progress, because the entire book’s status was in my head.” Once he got into a regular groove, the “runner’s high” kicked in and made it easier to keep going.
Cloister yourself
To throw down on Why We Fail, Victor Lombardi spent a week in a beach house off-season. “That allowed me to escape all other home and work distractions, and to research and write three chapters in that time,” he says.
Cloistering also was huge for Cheng. He finished his first draft in a cabin in the redwood forests of northern California, where he stowed away his phone and disabled all time-telling devices so he wouldn’t watch the clock. “I found that I was able to enter flow almost immediately,” he wrote in a blog post about the experience. “I got a lot more done in a shorter period of time than I normally would have.”
Don’t cloister yourself
What’s that? You don’t have the time or wherewithal to hunker down in a remote cabin? Not to worry; plenty of RM authors penned their books in crowded, noisy environs. Andy Polaine, who lives in Germany, worked on Service Design on long train journeys to and from Switzerland. “Personally, I work better in crowded spaces—trains, cafés—than I do in silence,” he says. “In solitary silence, every tiny thing is a distraction. In crowded places, my writing is the distraction.”
While cloistering may work for the heavy lifting of a first draft or cranking out copy for a deadline, Peter Jones finds it too confining for reviewing and revising. “A secluded office can lead to over-focus, making me hypercritical, and I end up wordsmithing meaning to death.” But he cautions, “Be careful following my advice; Design for Care took forever to write.”
Make It So co-author Nathan Shedroff finds cloistering helpful for certain tasks of book production, such as sorting research material, creating outlines, and indexing. But at other phases, solitude is counterproductive. “I find that writing is, at times, so confounding that being cloistered actually makes me less focused and more of a procrastinator,” he says.
If you’re collaborating with others, of course, some human contact will be necessary. The authors of Service Design—Polaine, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Løvlie—live in three different countries. Skype, Basecamp, Dropbox, and other tools helped immensely, but about halfway through, says Polaine, “we really needed a couple of days in a room together to nail the re-structuring. There’s nothing like having stuff pinned up on the wall.”
You won’t get everything in
You have a ton of material, yet UX changes all the time. How do you cover everything in such a way that it won’t be old news by the time the book’s published?
You probably can’t. Accepting that fact helped Sara Wachter-Boettcher move forward with Content Everywhere. “If I stick to a limited scope and do it well, my book will inspire further books and articles that tackle the topics I didn’t get to, or that dive deep into something I barely skimmed,” she says. “Getting stuck on the idea that you have to be exhaustive about your topic is a failing proposition: You will never finish that way.” If it just kills you to leave out certain stuff, well, blogs are lovely for that sort of thing, aren’t they?
Go analog
Ditching the laptop and writing on paper helped Buley drop “a work-y/email-y voice” and tap into “a different voice that was more intimate and conversational, which is the voice that I really want to share with readers.” She wrote her entire book on paper, then used dictation software to get it into digital form. “Probably not the most efficient method in the world, but it worked for me.”
Avail yourself of others.
Make It So co-author Chris Noessel says presenting material at conferences while he and Shedroff were writing the book “put pressure on us to find out what works, what doesn’t work, and get suggestions on improvements.” Other authors echoed this sentiment. Don’t be afraid to ask for input, they say; most people will be glad to offer some.
But before anything, you gotta produce some words. Other people can help with this too. Joining a “Shut Up and Write” meetup in San Francisco helped Aga Bojko plow ahead on Eye Tracking the User Experience. Her favorite sessions are weekend marathons held in a coffee shop, during which members write for ninety-minute sprints—no talking, no phones—broken up by thirty-minute breaks for eating, drinking, and socializing. People in her group work on everything from screenplays to poetry to dissertations. “The main idea is to get together and, thanks to peer pressure and encouragement, get a lot done,” says Bojko. “And we do get a lot done!”
A support system of trusted friends or colleagues, says Wachter-Boettcher, can help battle “the soul-sucking beast” of impostor syndrome: I’m not smart enough to do this. Everyone will laugh at this. “These are normal feelings but remember that they don’t reflect reality,” she says. And don’t be shy about drawing the line on outside input. Says Noessel: “Instruct your friends to not ask how the book is going. It’s the polite thing to do.”
And some other stuff.
Shedroff: “Take long flights and don’t watch the movie.”
Cheng: “Sometimes, momentum can be lost on the other end (after the book is finished) because the editors or other support people are busy with their schedules or other books. It’s as much up to you to keep the momentum going and not let that be an excuse for you to go, ‘Well, I haven’t heard from them. …”
Noessel: “It will take longer than you think.” “You have to build authority in the text, not presume it.” “The book will (should?) change the way you think. This is awesome.”
Buley: “Some people have what they want to say in their head at the beginning, and some people figure out what they want to say through the process of writing. I’m in the second camp. Once I realized that … I didn’t feel so bogged down by imposter syndrome or the slow guilties.” Also: “Get pregnant! A due date makes for a very formidable deadline.”
Wachter-Boettcher: “Write your heart out, do your damnedest, and be rigorous. But don’t drag your feet. After all, anyone can write. Authors ship.”
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.
We’re now more than a publishing company
Books are dead?
Sigh. No, they’re not.
But we’re no longer a publisher. At least not just a publisher. Let me explain.
Books themselves have never been the point. It’s what’s in them—in our case, expertise that changes how you do UX work—that’s always been more important than the format itself. Great expertise can be delivered in a variety of ways: not just books, but classes, consulting, and an exploding number of newer formats.
So, after years of thought, planning, and fretting, I’m proud to announce that Rosenfeld Media is no longer a publisher. In fact, I’m not sure what to call us. All I can tell you is what we’re doing: building and curating an ecosystem of user experience expertise.
At its center are the experts—at current count, 49—who can help you research and design better. Some are our own books’ authors, some have written excellent books for other publishers, and some are simply too busy to have written a book at all. What distinguishes them? Their combination of smarts and experience is simply without equal.
Our role in this ecosystem is to provide the infrastructure to get their expertise to you, in the formats that make most sense to you. You already know about our books (by the way, there are 14 more in the pipeline), and we’ll continue producing our series of public workshops in at least six cities annually. What’s new are these two lines of business:
- Consulting: High-value, short bursts of “teach a man to fish” consulting on dozens of UX-related topics. Bring in a guru for a couple days of advising, coaching, facilitating, showing, and mentoring, rather than extensive, long-term deliverables-based gigs. Think “brain shop” rather than “body shop”.
- On-site training: Our experts teach, at the moment, 42 full-day UX courses; it’s really an incredible catalog. Remember that great class you sat in on at the such-and-such conference? Now you can have it taught to your whole team—at your own location.
The upshot? You now have access to stellar UX expertise and education—all from a single source and a brand that, I hope, you’ve come to value. Now you can work directly with an expert whose work you’ve admired for a long time. Or have a critical gap in your team’s knowledge plugged. Or mix and match—work with us to pull together an interdisciplinary board of design advisors to meet with your team every quarter. Or a line-up for an in-house UX conference.
Please let me know if you have other suggestions. After all, this is, from what I can tell, an untested approach, and one that rubs up against two traditional, entrenched business models: large agency consulting (firmly of the 20th century), and book publishing (arguably stuck in the 19th century). Wouldn’t it be swell to disrupt them both at once?
So wish us luck! And, as always, please let me know what you think.
The Story Behind Two Waves Books
A decade ago, there was no publishing house focused solely on user experience design, so I founded Rosenfeld Media. If the world needed better experiences, then UX practitioners needed more and better books to help them design those experiences.
We started out publishing books on highly practical UX methods, like card sorting, prototyping and mental models. Many twists and turns later, our recent and upcoming titles cover as much strategic topics—like product management—as UX. UX has evolved into its own field—and it’s not close to being “done”.
To make sure that the books we publish stay relevant to UX people, we need to make them relevant for other people too. Let me explain.
Many of the people who’ve been in UX the longest now lead teams, business units—even companies. As a design leader, you’re likely to be more focused on infrastructure, like design systems, than on design itself. You’ve had to learn how to lead organizational change, recruit and hire talent, influence and negotiate and master other “soft” skills. More and more, design leaders and changemakers have their fingers on the levers of strategy.
The senior UX people I’ve spoken with find themselves collaborating with people who are outside the UX tribe: founders, product managers, C-level and middle managers, IT and marketing people. These “others” share a common realization: UX delivers business value. It gives products and organizations a clear competitive advantage. “Traditional” business people are looking to UX to solve larger scale problems and tap business opportunities.
I love that these two waves are converging. But what do we call this bigger umbrella? Design thinking? Design strategy? Meh. I just want Rosenfeld Media to be there and, as a publisher, help guide this movement in a productive, positive way. That’s why we’re launching Two Waves Books. 
Two Waves Books will cover a spectrum of creative leadership. We’re working with authors who’ve got experience surfing and navigating both waves. We’re leading off with Dave Gray’s Liminal Thinking (which is now available for pre-order), and Blind Spot, by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Sean Sauber. I’ll report more signings over the coming months; can’t wait to share these with you. And we’ve just signed Catherine Courage and Richard Dalton to write Design to Drive.
With Two Waves, our other new line Digital Reality Checks, and our continuing line of UX books for practitioners, I’m excited that Rosenfeld Media can help define another emerging field, and build bigger and better umbrellas.
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.
