RM Announcements

Interview with UX Expert Steve Krug

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:30:54 -0500

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

Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You'll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.

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—can do much of what I do as a usability consultant. They can't do it as well as I can—hopefully—because 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—held 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.—can'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.

Interview with UX Expert Aarron Walter

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:16:55 -0500

We're so excited that Aarron Walter will be sharing his UX wisdom at our upcoming event, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!

Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You'll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.

This week we pick Aarron's brain about UX tactics and product strategy. Here's what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: In our community MailChimp is perceived as a leader in newsletter services, heads above its competitors. Is it you who made the difference?

Aarron Walters:Not by any stretch. We have a bunch of really creative, sharp folks in our teams that all make cool stuff. We've found that hiring is a really important process to get right. We take a long time to hire the right folks rather than just going after skills. We spend a lot of time "dating" candidates, having dinner, testing their pool chops, and bringing them into design critiques. We want to hire talent, but a social fit is just as important, especially for a company with a distinct personality brand.

RM: Does your team take the lead in developing MailChimp's product strategy? Or does your team execute a strategy that's already been developed by MailChimp's leadership?

AW: My team—User Experience—works on design research, UI design, and front-end build out of MailChimp and many of our other apps, but strategy is becoming a bigger part of what we do as well.

Last year we had a small data overload crisis. We were getting so much feedback from customers, the support team, and colleagues. Though the feedback was valuable, it was too much information to triage into tasks for teams. Instead of just tossing it out, we started to forward all of the feedback into an Evernote account in the event that we may want to revisit it at some point.

Our CEO sent me an email asking how our customers were using a feature we were thinking about rebuilding. I did a quick search in the Evernote notebook and quickly found about 45 very valuable pieces of feedback from customers on this topic, each with an email address attached making follow up easy. In about a day we were able to define a series of recommendations based off real use cases from customers.

That experience got us really excited about learning more from our data. Because you can email notes into Evernote, it's easy to stream data in that you can then run searches on. We started feeding in Google Analytics reports, aggregate app usage data, all user interviews, usability test findings, industry research, account closing surveys and tons more. Now when we have a question, a quick search reveals industry trends, trends in our apps, and individual customers we can talk to for deeper understanding of an issue.

We call this approach Big Data UX. We're not parsing petabytes of data, but we're breaking down silos to get a very broad picture of things so we can shape a smart strategy.

RM: Do you see your team's role in product strategy changing much over the next five years?

AW: As we stream in new data from other departments, we'll be even better equipped to define strategy. The hardest part now is telling a concise, clear story of our findings so many teams can grok it in seconds. We're experimenting with video and posters so a strategic plan can be IMed or understood while you make coffee.

RM: Thanks, Aarron!

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

Now on sale: Steve Portigal's "Interviewing Users"

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:07:58 -0500

We're very happy to welcome a new member to the family: Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, by Steve Portigal. Our fifteenth (!) title, it's something of a throwback to our early days, when we were focused on UX method books. And interviewing is a method that we're all so familiar with, that we often take our skills for granted. That's where Steve's book comes in—by showing us how easy it is do it wrong and how to get it right.

Through his many years as a consultant, speaker, and columnist, Steve has helped so many in our community improve their interviewing skills. We're proud to help Steve take Interviewing Users to a new level.

Interview with UX Expert Susan Weinschenk

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:28:28 -0500

We're so excited that Susan Weinschenk will be sharing her UX wisdom at our upcoming event, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!

Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You'll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.

This week we pick Susan's brain about what the heck neuropsychology has to do with UX and how she entered the field to begin with. Here's what she had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: There don't appear to be many neuropsychologists running around the world of UX. How did you find your way into this field?

Susan Weinschenk: I was in graduate school getting a Ph.D. in Psychology and took my first programming class. I became fascinated with the relationship between psychology and interaction design. This was quite a while ago, when only specialists and scientists even USED a computer. I realized that as computers became more ubiquitous there would be a clash between the "user's" mental model of how to get something done and the "system's" mental model.

Then I discovered that there was a field of study—human factors—that specialized in this human/computer interaction and I was hooked! I was studying the brain at the time (left brain/right brain) and doing EEG studies (this was way before fMRI was available), so the neuropsychology applied to design was pretty much inevitable. I worked in usability and interaction design for many years, and then in the last 10 years I came back to my neuropsychology roots—the research on brain function in the last 10-15 years has really grown, and I ended up kind of where I started!

RM: Are there other major branches of psychology that could be applied to UX in a useful way?

SW: Many specialties in psychology apply, and I use all of them—cognitive psychology (memory, thinking), perceptual psychology (vision, hearing, tactile processing), personality, social... they all apply in my opinion and I use them all!

RM: Thanks, Susan!

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

Indi Young to tackle Practical Empathy

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:26:25 -0500

This one was a no-brainer.

We've signed a new book that will help researchers and designers take better advantage of empathy. We often take it for granted that we UX practitioners are, by definition, empathetic. But we're often wrong. And even if we are reasonably empathetic, we can all do better—by taking a conscious and critical dive into what empathy means and how we can actually use it more effectively. That's where Practical Empathy, due out in 2014, will help.

And of course, we're thrilled to be working once again with Indi Young—author of our very first book, Mental Models, co-founder of Adaptive Path, and Rosenfeld Media expert. I've had the unique pleasure of discovering huge mental model diagrams papering clients' war rooms again and again and again. Given that I'm both a consultant and publisher, you can guess how happy that makes me. I'm hoping Practical Empathy will have a similarly powerful impact on our industry.

Interview with UX Expert Luke Wroblewski

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:16:17 -0500

Luke Wroblewski will be sharing some awesome and practical advice at our upcoming event, coincidentally titled 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips.

Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You'll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.

This week we pick Luke's brain about how he stays ahead of the UX trends. Here's what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You seem to be ahead of the rest of us when it comes to figuring out what's going to be important in the field. Your books, like Web Form Design, are great examples of that. What's your secret? How do you figure it out?

Luke Wroblewski: Being late to things. In all seriousness, I don't think the trick is being early. Its being there at the right time. For example, it was no secret that mobile was going to be huge. In fact, for many years it was projected to be the "next big thing in 3 to 5 years," like many other technologies or trends we talk about today. But if you got there too early you were alone.

I'm usually not the first one to uncover new things, but I think I've been lucky with getting there at a time when lots of other people were also trying to figure stuff out—when there's lots of questions that need answering. I love to learn and explore new things so I feel good in that kind of environment. I also tend to get a handle on things by writing them out in order to understand them. So I do that a lot and share what I learn.

As a result, I uncover things that are of interest to people wrestling with the same questions. As the number of people encountering these questions increases, so does interest in the topic. And maybe that's why it feels like I'm "ahead." I certainly don't feel that way on most days!

RM: What do you think the next "big thing" will be in the UX field?

LW: I hear lots of people wrestling with delivering great experiences to a wide range of devices: laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, and everything in between. All these things are connected to the network so if you are making digital applications or publishing digital information—they're your problem. And there are lots of interesting, unanswered questions when it comes to designing and developing for this multi-device Web.

But it seems like this is just the start. TVs, watches, glasses, cars, wearables, and much more just extend this problem. Once you have more than one of these devices, questions about how they can work together become really important as well. These are the areas I'm most interested in these days. No guarantees that they'll be the next "big thing" but there is a lot of uncertainty out there about how to tackle these problems. Which, to me, is really exciting.

RM: Thanks, Luke!

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

Interview with Whitney Quesenbery

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:44:08 -0500

Whitney Quesenbery will be sharing some essential bits of advice in our upcoming event, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! It's a one-day virtual conference in which 6 experts offer...you guessed it...31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!

Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You'll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.

This week we pick Whitney's brain about universal design principles and the content of her forthcoming book. Here's what she had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You and Sarah Horton have a new book coming out, Web Design For Everyone—can you tell us about it?

Whitney Quesenbery: Almost three years ago, we started talking to Lou about an accessibility book. As important as the technical standards are, I knew that a Rosenfeld Media book has to start with the user experience. And I'm not that technical. I wanted a way to think about a project that would start with people, and would acknowledge all of the different considerations that go into making a web site or app.

Think about what it takes to do something as simple as putting a heading on the screen. There's user research and IA, content strategy and HTML markup, graphic design and CSS coding, the structure of the site and the server it sits on. All of them have to pull together to make that heading show up in a browser. If we can get all of that right, adding accessibility doesn't seem so hard.

We've organized the book around the way we think as UXers. It starts with personas, so we don't forget that UX is about people. Then, each chapter looks at one principle of UX design:

Clear purpose
Solid structure
Easy interaction
Helpful wayfinding
Clean presentation
Plain language
Accessible media
Universal usability

The principles also take in the many disciplines that contribute to UX, so we hope that any practitioner can explore how their own skills and method contribute to making a web for everyone.

RM: You mention "Universal Design Principles" in your book? Could you tell us a little about those?

WQ: One of the things I like about the Universal Design Principles is that they really are principles - not rigid rules for design. I think of them as 7 questions to ask about any UX project. The answers guide the design towards a product that can be used by everyone.

Is it an equitable experience, appealing to all equally?
Is it flexible, allowing for people to choose how to use it?
Is it simple, consistent, and clear?
Does it present information in multiple ways, supporting all senses?
Does it tolerate errors without punishing users?
Is it comfortable and efficient to use?
Does it allow people with different physical abilities to use it?

Those sound like questions I'd want to ask about anything I worked on. The big leap to universal principles is thinking about people with many different abilities and preferences, not just dictating one experience.

You might also notice that these principles can be applied to physical objects and spaces, not just to the web. The group that created them in 1997 included architects, industrial designers and engineers. They were concerned with how people interacted with anything in the world --- which now includes the online world. That makes a lot of sense to me now that user experience includes both software and hardware devices.

(You can read the official version at the Center for Universal Design)

RM: We heard that we should be designing for Mobile First, but you're actually addressing Accessibility First. Are these themes in conflict? Or do they complement one another?

WQ: They are absolutely not in conflict. In fact, I think we'd have better web sites if we combined them. Both of them say that we need to start by designing for constraints. In both cases, there are both technical and human constraints.

In mobile, for example, you have a small screen, limited bandwidth, and a device that is often used by someone on the go - certainly not a person sitting at an ergonomically correct desk, paying complete attention to the interface. Mobile First simply says to design for that situation. Find the most critical features. Make the screen easy to read. And make sure that people can tap on buttons or other controls without accidentally doing the wrong thing.

In accessibility, the constraints are the human senses and the need for alternatives. What if someone can't see the image or hear the video intro? Can they use the site? The same responsive design approach that lets a site or app work on different size screens also lets it work when users need larger text, or different colors.

Both mobile and accessibility also rely on sites built to strong standards. This may sound pretty boring, but it makes all sorts of things possible because accessibility relies on two things that standards provide: flexibility (for different ways of displaying content) and interoperability (so that people can choose the technology that fits their needs). This solid structure is a foundation for a great user experience for everyone.

RM: Thanks, Whitney!

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

Interview with Responsive Design Expert Aaron Gustafson

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:45:02 -0500

The Responsive Design Studio is quickly approaching! Join us in NYC, April 29-May 1, for three days with three multi-disciplinary experts: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson. Remember, you can get a hefty team discount if you register with three or more!

This week we sat down with Aaron to get his take on the world of Responsive Design. Here's what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You've had a lot of varied experience in the field of responsive design. If you could go back in time to give the younger you some advice on the topic, what would it be?

Aaron Gustafson: Be adaptable, but keep your eye on the big picture.
Things change so frequently in this industry that you can spend all of your time trying to keep up with the latest techniques. It can be so overwhelming at times that it becomes tempting to tune out and take an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach. Balance is important. We need to be flexible enough to allow ourselves room to change our approach as we learn more about our medium while at the same time viewing the latest techniques through a critical lens that takes into account the true effect the adoption of a given approach, methodology, or technique will have on the end product and how our customers experience it.

RM: What are a few things that all UXers need to know about this topic?

AG: It's important to realize that everything we do is connected. Whether we are devising a business strategy, writing copy, designing wireframes and interfaces, or authoring code, each decision, line, and keystroke we make has a profound effect on the experience of using our products.

RM: Thanks, Aaron!

There's still time to sign up for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May 1 in NYC! Join Aaron along with Jason CranfordTeague and Sara Wachter-Boettcher for a three-day intensive course that's interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

Interview with Responsive Design Expert Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:31:35 -0500

Our new Responsive Design Studio is coming up in just a few weeks! Join us in NYC, April 29-May 1, for three days with three multi-disciplinary experts: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson. Early Bird Registration ends this Friday, 3/30 so get your tickets now!

This week we sat down with Sara to pick her brain about Responsive Design tactics. Here's what she had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You came from a background in writing and editing. How does that experience apply to the content strategy consulting you do today, and what other skills did you have to learn?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Working in journalism, copywriting, and then web writing, I learned a lot about how to tell stories, set pacing—whether for a quick headline or a slowly unfolding feature—and communicate ideas. I learned to be consistent, yet lively. I learned how to adjust my communication style for my audience.

These are all skills I bring to content strategy work, but content strategy includes much more than just writing and editing, or even planning for writing and editing. It's about having a clear sense of organizational goals, and defining how content is going to support them: What role will content play in achieving your vision? This takes a whole set of new skills, from interviewing stakeholders and helping them articulate big-picture ideals to identifying workflow problems to facilitating collaboration across groups that haven't historically gotten along to understanding the systems that support content, like CMSes.

RM: What are some of the challenges you see organizations facing as they go about dealing with content?

SWB: Right now, mobile is such a tremendous challenge for organizations—and not just technically. Trying to make their existing content—which they often have a lot of—mobile-ready and accessible is a massive undertaking. And it's not just because it's hard work to clean up existing content and break it down into modular parts. It's because doing so also means changing how the organization functions. So many of our content problems are really, at their core, organizational issues: departments that don't talk to one another; leadership that can't get the staff excited—and invested in—a vision; people creating content for their internal department, rather than for their audience.

You can't just have people operating in silos creating "their" pages of content; you need people working together across disciplines to see their content as a system of interconnected assets—and that's a big shift for both content creators and organizational structures.

In fact, the more I've worked on content strategy—and specifically on helping organizations adapt for mobile—the more I have come to realize that not only can I not just write all my clients' content for them, I also can't just make models and deliver "deliverables." Instead, I need to spend the bulk of my time negotiating the people problems and political headaches that surround the content. That's how content becomes sustainable in the long term.

RM:So what are some of the most common misconceptions about mobile content?

SWB: I think the biggest one is still the idea that "No one would want to do that on their phone!" I hear it all the time as an excuse to remove content from a mobile site. It's often tied to this notion that mobile users are "on the go"—that they only want quick information or are only performing certain tasks. Sure, some mobile users are rushing out the door or performing a quick task while waiting in line, but many studies have shown that people are using mobile devices all over the place: sitting on the couch, from bed, at work, everywhere. Google's research even shows that more people browse the web on a smartphone from home than anywhere else.

So while you might re-prioritize content if you have actual data that shows mobile users are more likely to want specific things on a mobile device, it's a huge problem to assume they will never want—and to remove access to—some content based on the device they're using. As Karen McGrane says, "you don't get to decide which device they use to access your content. They do." People are going to use any device that is available to them to do anything they need to do. Why do we want to make choices for them?

RM: It sounds like organizations have a lot of work to do, then. Where should they start?

SWB: The key is to work toward baseline accessibility of content regardless of device, and that starts with revisiting all those legacy assets and cleaning out the gunk. Do you really need 10,000 pages of content? Why? For whom? Does that content need to be so long, or is it full of fluff and repetition? Asking these questions can help you pare all your content down to just what matters most—on mobile or anywhere else. From there, it's a lot easier to start looking at improving the experience of content in different contexts by adding structure: breaking it into its constituent pieces and parts so it can be reformatted, reused, and reshaped to fit different displays.

RM: Thanks, Sara!

There's still time to get the Early Bird Discount for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May 1 in NYC! Join Sara along with Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson for a three-day intensive course that's interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

Interview with Responsive Design Expert Jason CranfordTeague

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:29:19 -0500

Our new Responsive Design Studio is just around the corner! Join us in NYC, April 29-May 1, for three days with three multi-disciplinary experts: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson. Each will be on hand for all three days; capped at 50 participants, that's a 17:1 student:teacher ratio!

This week we had a chance to ask Jason to share some wisdom on Responsive Design from his perspective as a visual designer. Here's what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: As a designer, how do you convince your clients to get on board with Responsive Design?

Jason CranfordTeague: I get this question from a lot of designers: they would love to be using Responsive Web Design (RWD) techniques in their projects, but their clients and managers don't understand what the benefits are. This is especially true when weighted against the extra effort it requires. Before you can even start planning to include RWD in a project, you need to get buy in from clients and from co-workers. The good news is once you show the upward trend of mobile devices and and lay out how RWD allows you to target not only the devices, but the context those devices are likely to be used in, most clients and team members quickly come around. In fact, the most common response I get is "why wouldn't we do it that way?"

RM: What are some of the pitfalls designers encounter with creating responsive web designs?

JCT: The biggest downside to working with RWD is during the planning stage, where you have to consider your content and design, not just from the perspective of someone sitting at a computer screen or a laptop, but of someone sitting in a coffee shop using a tablet or walking busy streets using a smart-phone. Web designers are used to creating static wireframes and visual comps, and struggle when it comes to having to produce these for multiple-screens. One of the techniques I help my students understand is how using recently developed prototyping tools makes it so much easier to plan their designs for all three major contexts dynamically.

RM: How can RWD be used to help tailor an interface for context

JCT: If content is king, then context is queen. But for a long time, web interface designers have been able to get away with assuming their audiences are all in the same context: sitting at a desk. This is no longer the case as mobile devices allow users to untether themselves. RWD cannot tell you exactly where and how a user may be interacting with your designs, but by detecting the device capabilities, we can make some educated guesses that will inform our use cases for presentation and functionality.

RM: What is the most common mistake you see being made with RWD?

JCT: I see designs all the time where the tablet or smart-phone versions are just "mini-me" iterations of the computer screen version. One size does not fit all, and the layout that works for one screen and orientation does not always work on others screens or orientations. Navigation patterns, layouts, interactions, and even functionality will need to shift or change entirely as the design shifts between different contexts.

RM: What's the coolest thing you can do with RWD that most people haven't heard about?

JCT: That would have to be Webfont iconography. Web fonts have come on strong the last several years, exploding the typographic possibilities for web designs. But what a lot of designers and developers do not realize is that web fonts can be used to create easily styleable and infinitely resizable icons. Since fonts are vector in nature, you can create dingbat font files with your needed icons, and then size them for the context without resorting to multiple images and without loss of image quality.

RM: Thanks Jason!

There's still time to get the Early Bird Discount for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May1 in NYC! Join Jason along with Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Aaron Gustafson for a three-day intensive course that's interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

An Interview with Service Design authors Andy Polaine and Lavrans Løvlie

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:40:35 -0500

We're thrilled to report that Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, went on sale just moments ago! Written by service design educator Andy Polaine, and Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason - both founding partners at live | work, Service Design is very much a practical book. But it also provides a Big Picture of service design, putting this emerging and increasingly critical field in perspective for designers of all stripes.

We got the chance to sit down and ask Andy and Lavrans to give us some insider tips on their experience in the field of Service Design. Here's what they had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: What are a few things you'd wished you'd known before you got into the field?

Andy Polaine: I wish I knew more about the way MBAs think in order to be able to relate what we do to management in a language they are used to working with. I wish I had known more about working with qualitative field research, particularly the results and how to make sense of them. Synthesis is something that most people learn on the fly, but it's an essential skill.

RM: So, we need to be better at "MBA-speak"?

AP: Well, designers of all flavors are often loud about championing the user/customer and we focus all our empathy big guns on them. But we're pretty awful about turning that lens back on our clients and understanding what their issues, beliefs and motivations are. It's easy to bang on about human-centered design if you're not the one having to explain why you spent money on it to a board or shareholders who live their lives in spreadsheets.

RM: Could you point out some common mistakes in Service Design so we can avoid them?

AP: Don't get caught at either end of the telescope. It's easy to get totally bound up in the details of one particular touchpoint, especially if it has some kind of sexy, new technology attached to it and forget the simple stuff and the overview of how participants in the service move through the entire service ecosystem. At the same time, it's easy to get caught up in a great, big concept idea and ignore the fact that the details make all the difference.

RM: How about a Service Design horror story?

AP: I once killed someone with a Post-It note. No, not really. But, due to a cancellation and a switch of interviewees, I once ended up interviewing a bunch of lawyers at an oil exploration company about their views on hydrogen fuel cell cars and future transport trends. Naturally, they were a little hostile to the idea. In any case, they refused to sign any release forms, would not let me record anything and refused the interviewee fee (who would have thought lawyers would turn down money?). I insisted I make notes, at least, but had to wrap it up pretty swiftly. This was in 2007 and the place was decked out like an office in Dallas from the 80s.

Rosenfeld Media: Tell us about the birth of Service Design.

Lavrans Løvlie: The label was born in the 90's in academia in Europe, mostly connected to sustainable product design. As far as we know we were the first company in the world to turn it into a commercial proposition. During the early 00's London was a hub for new design thinking, and benefited from a perfect storm of young designers eager to challenge the industry, a political climate that funded research projects via the UK design council, and customers that were eager to push the boundaries of using design to drive innovation.
During those years we worked systematically to collaborate with other design companies to build a market, define a shared set of language and methods in the industry, publish, teach and research with academic institutions, and to educate the market. By the second half of the 00's the core thinking of the field was relatively solid, and we have seen hundreds of companies develop Service Design propositions, and clients across the globe put the thinking into practice

RM: So, why do services need design?

LL: Because design serves society, and our biggest challenges in the developed world isn't any more about satisfying material needs through products. Over the last century have gone from seeking a better standard of living to seeking better quality of life. In simple terms, the world does not need new chairs, but we need banks that work for citizens, health services that provide better for people, transport solutions that don't threaten the environment, public services that truly serve citizens needs and communication services that enable us to keep in touch with people we care about. All the great challenges in our developed world is in the service space - and new solutions need design to keep the human at the heart of development.

RM: We'll ask you what we asked Andy: What are some common mistakes in Service Design?

LL: The reason many Service Design projects fail to reach the real world of the market is that designers struggle to understand how difficult it is to implement change. Services cross channels, and impact not only on customers, but on technology, staff, organization, culture, and processes. In short, they affect organizations in broad and complex ways. A humble approach to the challenges that clients face in making concepts real is needed in order to help them reach people with new services.

RM: Thanks guys!

Again, the book is on sale March 13 - today! You can also win an ebook version thanks to a contest sponsored by our friends at Readmill - just follow them at @Readmill. Finally, Andy, Ben and Lavrans will present a free webcast on Service Design through our partner, O'Reilly Media, tomorrow (March 14)!

Two new UX events for spring 2013

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:10:08 -0500

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!

Good News, Bad News

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:10:15 -0500

Okay...the bad news first:

We recently had a fresh batch of Web Form Design paperbacks printed up and shipped to our distribution centers in three countries. After which we noticed, to our deep dismay, an odd printing defect: the title and author name were somehow omitted from the book's spine.

Woof.

The good news is that a new, more-carefully QA'd batch is now being printed. And if you have one of those books with the mysterious spine, here's what you can do:

Email us (customerservice@rosenfeldmedia.com) a photo of the defective spine
Let us know if you'd like us to mail you a new copy (please include a shipping address); or let us know if you'd like the ebook versions of another of our titles.

We recommend you go for the ebook version of another title. Obviously, we want you to read more of our titles, but really, we're looking out for you. We're convinced that the defective spine version of Web Form Design will be worth as much as this some day:

Readmill + your iPhone + our books

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:05:16 -0500

Ever since those "Send to Readmill" buttons appeared on our site, we've been getting lots of thank yous from our customers.

Now that Readmill has launched its iPhone app—this morning—as in just a few minutes ago!—we expect even more. After all, your iPad is handy, but your iPhone is handier—so now you'll be able to squeeze in some reading where iPads fear to tread. And Readmill's position syncing means you can read our books across devices without losing your place.

With all the great features Readmill provides, our printer must be sweating profusely...

Grab the new Readmill for iPhone app and enjoy!

So You Want to Write a UX Book

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 11:35:00 -0500

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."