We're putting on our first Rosenfeld Media speaking tour! An all-star cast of Rosenfeld Media authors and friends will be visiting San Francisco, Atlanta, and Chicago over the coming months, and we'd love you to be part of it. Each day-long workshop is very hands-on and very intimate. Frankly, you're not really supposed to enjoy yourself so much while learning. But we think you will.

Here's the line-up; register now to take advantage of early bird discounts (we discount groups as well):

Continue reading "UX workshops on parade" »

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

If you're excited by the interfaces you see in films like Minority Report and District 9, now you can justify the hours you've spent watching Star Trek episodes and other science fiction films and television. Design has always been a form of fiction, so it comes as no surprise that interaction designers can benefit from the processes and concepts created for these stories. Whether you watch on your tricorder, er, iPhone, on the big screen, or on your iPad (which, by the way, you might have caught a glimpse of back in 2004 watching The Incredibles), science fiction can offer serious design insight as well as fascinating fun.

Science fiction has remained a pastime for designers, instead of a valuable source of insight and learning—until now. Make It So, by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel, will be the first book to connect the inspiring "blue sky" designs of scifi with your own work in interaction design. We're very excited to be publishing this book, and expect it to be available in late 2011.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)

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

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

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

Continue reading "The future: now 25% off!" »

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 1:07 PM | Comments (0)

We've got big news: we've just finalized an agreement with O'Reilly Media, and from now on they'll handle all indirect sales of our digital editions. This means that Rosenfeld Media books will soon be available in an incredible array of new channels, including Android Market, Amazon's Kindle store, Apple's App Store, iBookStore, and iTunes, the Safari Books Online subscription service, and Kobo. It's no secret that O'Reilly is a true pioneer when it comes to digital publishing. We're thrilled that we'll be working with and learning from them in the coming years.

You'll still be able to purchase our digital editions—in two flavors of PDF, as well as MOBI and ePUB, directly from our web site. But we're glad to work with O'Reilly to get you our books in other ways too. We'll have more information to share soon.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 6:32 PM | Comments (1)

The UX Bookmobile is about to make its way to snowy Colorado. It'll start out its frosty tour in Boulder, taking in the IxDA's Interaction conference with its two acolytes in tow. After enjoying a few days of microbrews, meditation, and quinoa salads, it'll dodge over to Aspen for an extended ski break, then head to Denver for the IA Summit, and yet more microbrews.

Continue reading "UX Bookmobile takes a roadtrip" »

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

Eye tracking applications are beginning to proliferate, and many vendors would have you believe that their particular technology will suit all of your user research needs. What's needed is a clear, practical, and skeptical perspective on the method and the technologies to counter-balance the marketing noise.

That's why we're very happy to have signed Aga Bojko, a researcher at User Centric and editor at UPA's User Experience magazine, to help make sense of eye tracking. Her book, Eye Tracking the User Experience (due out in early 2012), will offer practical step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare and conduct eye tracking studies, how to analyze and interpret eye movement data, and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.

Please keep up with (and, when you can, contribute to) Aga's progress by following her work at her book's site (here's its RSS feed). And of course, we'll be glad to let you know when the book comes out (and send you a nice discount) if you request a publication notification.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 1:15 PM | Comments (0)