UX Publishing

Lou Rosenfeld started out as an information architecture practitioner, helped get that community going, co-wrote a book that helped drive it, and ran an IA consultancy for years. When he got interested in user experience more broadly, he found traditional technology publishers treated it as a drop in the bucket, so he started a company to publish UX books as a hobby. Some 16 or 17 years later, Rosenfeld Media has published around 60 books, runs workshops, and hosts four conferences a year, about 25 so far. His only secret, he says, is sticking with it long enough to learn from your mistakes.

The steady sellers say a lot about the field. The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley, more than ten years old, may sell even better now, because so many people do UX work without seeing themselves as part of the profession. Steve Portigal's Interviewing Users, now in its second edition, covers a skill that never loses relevance. Jim Kalbach's The Jobs to Be Done Playbook, the bestseller of recent years, sits where design meets what animates business people and product managers. The book he'd like someone to write is a practical guide to making sense of organizations: how culture, politics, decisions and money really move, as opposed to the org chart, the official IT map or the annual report. Even a rough, half-baked map would help the new hires, consultants and salespeople who spend their first six months flailing.

On conferences, his advice is to ban the word. The real goal is getting professionals together to learn and talk, a broad conversation condensed into a couple of days, and it should be designed that way. Rosenfeld Media speakers work in cohorts for about three months beforehand with paid curators and a professional speaker coach. Virtual attendees join free cohorts of around ten people with two facilitators, a kickoff, daily check-ins and a private Slack channel. His advice for people entering UX is not to get too attached to a job title. New labels help people find each other, but they have a short shelf life.