Bobulate

For as far as we’ve come, are we just evolving back to where we started? As part a panel for The HappyCorp’s publishing workshop for New York’s Design Week recently, I helped field questions from an audience of online publishers. Their primary questions were about “RSS,” focused on ways they can improve the reading experience of their content through feed readers.

As I listened to my co-panelists answer, I heard them describing not new ways to design for reading in social environments, not new strategies for user engagement, but something pretty pedestrian: how to improve the isolated reading experience.

Designers are becoming more masterful at creating social experiences, yet reading with most feed readers is still much like reading a magazine or a book: isolated but portable, modular yet somewhat sequential. While that timing and sequence is controlled by the reader, it is still a solo experience. More…

If you’ve been thinking more about web forms recently, you’re not alone. Luke Wroblewski has been actively campaigning for better-designed forms, educating and evangelizing about a topic hardly considered before: the design of forms. Even if you’ve been unable to catch his worldwide talks (and even more so if you have), you need to drop everything. Right now. Because his book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, is now available for sale. More…

To finish something is quite delightful. Watching other people — people you admire — finish something is the next-best thing. That’s why I’m duly delighted to report that Indi Young’s first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behavior, is in publication and available for purchase from Rosenfeld Media (although I’m not the first to report as much).

The book’s official description:

“There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product — but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users’ reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons.

Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.”

And while part of Rosenfeld Media’s process, as publisher, is behind us for now (save promotion and marketing), the reader experience with the book is just beginning. More…

Sure it’s true. Books — real books in print — have been around for, well, quite a while. But as a new publisher of user experience books (and staunch researchers), we want to ensure that the books we design are as usable as possible.

We’re looking to apply some usability research strategies to test both print and digital editions of our first book, Indi Young’s Mental Models. To do this, we need your help. More…