Toluu : Bloug

Bloug

Lou Rosenfeld on information architecture and user experience.

...with creating Rosenfeld Media groups for both Facebook and LinkedIn.

Now don't get me wrong. Apples and oranges. I really love both services. And Christina, who's now at LinkedIn. They'd better be paying her really, really well.

But it's definitely easier to get going virally in Facebook. About 70 fans in about four hours, and a few helpful comments. In fact, the process of figuring out how to get it set up was aided quite a bit by a few of my 200 plus Facebook friends.

In LinkedIn, I have about 500 contacts. But, um, they're not friends. At least they don't feel that way. Sure, it's a business network, but I don't feel like there's anyone I can turn to for help. And it's far, far harder to invite those contacts to join.

Both services have their respective benefits. Sometimes a tighter, more restrictive network has its purposes. And it's far too early to make a judgment here. But I figured out how to get things going pretty quickly with the Facebook group. I'm still grappling with the LinkedIn group.

Some help here?

If you want to kick the tires on either or both, here you go:

Remote user research bookNovember 20

I'm pretty jazzed that Rosenfeld Media has signed a new book: Remote Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte. I'm convinced that more and more user research will be done remotely in the coming years, and we really need a book—this book—to guide us. Here's the full announcement:

We've been working on getting Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte to write a book on remote user research for a couple years now. Through their work at Bolt | Peters, purveyors of Ethnio, a remote research service, they've become experts at leveraging new technologies to study users in their native habitats.

Well, we've finally succeeded, and Remote Research is now officially a Rosenfeld Media book-in-progress site! We're quite excited by their proposal; you can get a taste of what they'll cover from its full description and tentative table of contents.

Aside from visiting the site, you can also keep up with their progress by subscribing to their site's RSS feed. Or if you prefer, you can just sign up to

More mental modelsNovember 17

Just published Victor Lombardi's interview with Indi Young on the cutting edge of mental models. Obviously we're doing this to crassly promote our upcoming webinar with Indi. But hey, we did include a 20% discount on the page.

If you've already read Indi's book, you'll see from reading the interview that the webinar takes mental models beyond what she covered in the book. And if you haven't, well, the registration fee includes a copy of the book—and you should have more than enough time to read it before December 11.

Resolution for 2009: UX Book Salon tourNovember 14

Even though the Christmas decorations are just starting to appear here in Brooklyn, it's not too soon to make a New Year's Resolution.

When I started Rosenfeld Media, I set up a few brown bag lunches with groups of designers and researchers from a few local UX firms. I was looking to learn more about what our target audience liked and didn't like about the design of the books they used for their work. I asked them to bring their own books to the discussion. The resulting show and tell discussions were fantastically useful, and had a significant impact on the designs of both our digital and paperback editions. (Notes on these discussions here.)

Just as important, these discussions provided an outlet for some intense, passionate discussions about UX books, their designs, and their topics. UX pros' pent-up feelings clearly needed to be expressed, and it was enlightening for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, once Rosenfeld Media started actually producing books, I got side-tracked by details of promoting, selling, and distributing them. Bad, Lou, bad. A publisher should always be meeting with and talking with his community. And a UX publisher? Only more so, obviously.

So, starting next year, I resolve to organize informal UX Book Salons on

Luke on the future of web form designNovember 9

This past weekend I interviewed Luke Wroblewski about gradual engagement and other issues at the cutting edge of web form design. He'll be covering this topic in great detail during his webinar (coming up this Thursday, November 13). Check out the interview and snag a 20% discount off the registration fee.