Louis Rosenfeld
Breaking Out of Silos and Moment Prisons
In this episode of Brave UX, Lou Rosenfeld, UX’s master publisher, curator and convener, and founding mind of the discipline of information architecture, reflects on 30 years in the field.
Highlights include:
- What is a moment prison and how do you get out of one?
- Why is it your life's mission to bring people together?
- What advice do you have for prospective UX authors?
- What do you think about organisational silos and professional jargon?
- Why is it difficult for organisations to realise a return on UX?
Who is Louis Rosenfeld?
Lou is the Founder and Publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a company responsible for surfacing and sharing the expertise of dozens of world-class UXers through publishing books, curating specialist communities, and convening global conferences.
He is also widely considered to be one of the founders of Information Architecture, a result of being a co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” - often referred to as the “IA Bible”.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class practitioners in UX design and product management. My guest today is Louis Rosenfeld, or Lou, as he prefers to be called. According to Lou's Wikipedia entry, he's an American information scientist, but that doesn't really do him justice. He's much more than that. Lou is Rosenfeld Media's founder and publisher. His company is responsible for surfacing and sharing the expertise of dozens of world class UXers, publishing their books, providing training opportunities and convening global conferences all so that we can learn from one another. Lou was also widely considered to be one of the founding minds and practitioners of information architecture in the early nineties.
- Lou co-founded Argus Associates with Peter Morville. It was one of the first consulting firms entirely devoted to the practice of information architecture under Argus. And as an independent consultant, Lou has helped companies including AT&T, Ford, PayPal, and Caterpillar, as well as many other large highly political organizations to grapple with their information headaches. With Peter, Lou co-authored the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, often referred to as the IA Bible that was first published in 98 and is now in its fourth edition. When Lou's not busy producing conferences, orchestrating communities, or reading book pitches, he can be found interviewing other leading minds in UX. On his podcast, the Rosenfeld Review, his personal mission is to help designers make the world a better place. And today he's here with me on Brave UX. Lou, welcome to the show.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Thank you Brendan. It's great to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here. And I always like to start on a serious note and I couldn't help but notice on your LinkedIn profile that you described yourself as many of the things I've just read in your introduction. But as a publisher, podcaster, author, conference producer, and polar bear, now I'm fairly sure that Rosenfeld Media's logo is an elephant. So what's the story behind the polar bear?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Oh, the polar bear. That was the animal on the cover of the information architecture book that we did with Riley and
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, makes sense now.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Yeah, they refer to it as the Polar Bear book, which is a lot nicer sound than information architecture for the worldwide web or the web and beyond as the fourth edition is called. But I will say that the O'Reilly model of animals on the covers is always been a great one, but the authors have zero input, so we were just grateful that it was a polar bear and not a banana slug or one of the toads that they've got on some of the book cover. We're very happy with the polar bear.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's one of my favorite animals. I think you did well to get that randomly selected. So tell me, Lou, you earned a BA from Michigan, university of Michigan. It was in history and then you went on to complete your masters in information and library studies. Now I get the history side of things, but what exactly is library studies?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well librarianship is not just about sitting in a behind a desk in a room full of books and shushing people from time to time. A very chip is about many things that are really critical for people today who are dealing with information of any sort who's not. So we had to learn some rigorous things about, for example, building a collection of books that people would use and how to measure that use. That's not so unlike what we have to do. And we are creating a content strategy and thinking about the analytics associated with that more in a more modern telling. We had to learn things about how to do a reference interview. So that means how to understand a user, in this case a library patron and understand what their needs are, which aren't always what they say, but how to help them express what those needs are in a way that's not uncomfortable or prying and then connect them with the information contain.
- In the library we had to learn things like cataloging how to make information about books and also about archival content accessible to people in the language that made sense to those people. So how do you catalog, tag and otherwise label information in a way that it can be found, understood and used? So librarianship is an extremely valuable set of skills and when I was in library school in the late 1980s, we were learning those basic skills, but they were very much framed in terms of a physical place known as a library, which is understandable but very limiting. And in fact they all used to be called library schools back then and they're all called I schools Information schools or information science programs or something along those lines today cuz it's better branding but it's also an effort to connect those skills to the modern digital era.
- And when I was there, there was talk about the information explosion upon that's go that was going to be upon us, but there wasn't really yet much action about what that meant. And when Peter Morville and I for example, started thinking and writing about information architecture, we had a couple chips on our shoulders collectively. One was we wanted to show the world that librarianship is going to be really, really critical as the information revolution exploded. Which it did, especially once the web came out once the graphical browser came out Mosaic in like 1994. And we wanted to show live librarians that they were important outside of libraries and a lot of them couldn't see life outside of those rooms for the books. So that was our goal.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like you were really well placed at the time that the internet was about to or was taking off to take these skills that you had been learning in library studies and apply them to this new medium. And you mentioned Peter Morville who is your co-author but also your co-founder of AR Associates. How did you and Peter come to meet?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well it's interesting. So actually he's not a co-founder to technically. I had started the company with a professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan an old friend of mine, Joe James [affirmative] now at University of Washington. In any case Joe and I, when we first started ar, we started it as a hobby to teach people how to use the internet and this was when that meant teaching them how to use Telenet and FT and Waste and Archie and Veronica and all these bizarre difficulties tools. And we were teaching librarians and we were teaching educators and a number of other people in workshops that we would produce ourselves back in 92, 91 even. And then Peter was a grad student, I was actually working for the school of Information full time and Joe was on the faculty of course [affirmative]. And we saw opportunities to grow artists and we brought Peter on as an employee, our first employee.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh I see.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- A very promising student, obviously very smart guy. It was pretty obvious then. And over that time not only did I start the doctoral program at Michigan but we saw that great transition or that pivot from teaching people how to use content on the internet to teaching people how to produce continent basically products. And it was amazing for them because suddenly not only had they learned some really interesting skills, but they had customers, they actual users. And if you're a library science student in 19 94, 95, that's not what you were expecting.
- It was addictive and it was revolutionary for them. And one of 'em, for example parlay his work on a personal finance guide to becoming a VP at site, if you remember site. Yeah. So we were teaching people how to do that. I think it was the first courses in academia, at least in the United States that were about creating content for the internet. And come 1995, I had to choose between staying the doctoral program and getting AR really going cuz we knew there was a lot of work. Peter was pretty busy and I had to choose. So I figured, yeah, someday I could go back and finish my PhD someday.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You gone and finished it?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Not quite yet. Maybe I'll go back. That was, let's see 26 years ago.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Plenty of time left, plenty
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Of time. All I'm ABD, I'm all but dissertation. Got all my coursework done.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh], I was gonna ask you about that. So is it good? It is good that you've touched on that and told us why you did end up pursuing AR full time and not completing the PhD. You said that the work we're starting to pick up and I just wanna put this into context with people that are listening. So what Lou's been talking about is even pre Brower days, a lot of the tools that Lou's been mentioning there is before there was even a Netscape or a Internet explorer. So this is really early in pioneering stuff.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Oh yeah, I had a informal title. I was one of the University of Michigan go for Masters [laugh]. That means I ran a gopher server and Gopher is really look it up. It was pretty cool. But as soon as the web got graphical it just wiped away Gopher.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wonder if it'll come back at some point. So you ran August for 12 years, if I'm correct, leaving it in 2003. And from what I can tell, it seemed like a consultancy and information architecture consultancy at least what it ended up being. What changed for you? What was the moment that you realized that you had done what you wanted to do with August and it was time to move on? Well
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- I wish I could answer that question, but that moment didn't really come. So we actually reached our peak in late 2000. I remember October of 2000 we were approaching 40 employees, [affirmative] and we were doing consulting for large organizations, not startups, not coms but insurance companies consulting firms utility companies, some manufacturers. We had a pretty blue chip clientele and most of the people on our team were librarians but many of them were specialists that came from related areas. We were actually trying to build an early interdisciplinary UX team. So we had a specialist ethnography, we had another specialist in deep taxonomy development, we had a specialist in markup languages, we had a specialist in usability engineering and so forth. And we had a really interesting model and then we had an economic downturn. And so from October, 2000, our peak, Peter and I had to close the business down in actually not 2003 but April of 2001.
- So almost exactly 20 years ago because a business like that was a canary in a coal mine for an economic downturn. Companies, even large ones that really were in pretty good shape, the IBMs and so forth where our clients were cutting back on their consulting budgets and if you're gonna cut back on consulting, the first thing you're gonna cut is the area that you understand the least and has the tangible value. And that's something like information architecture. So we saw the writing on the wall, we didn't wanna drag it out and we decided we would just close everything down and pay off our bills and pay severance to all of our people rather than go bankrupt. And that's what we did. So it was a beautiful, beautiful model but we didn't quite get to realize what we'd hoped for.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thinking about that time, what was that like for you going through that and making those which sound like very difficult decisions, not just personally but with an impact on other people's lives and careers. How was that for you? How did that feel?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Terrible it, it's horrible To lay people off, we had to do one round of layoffs is horrible. It's one of the worst things I've ever had to go through and I had it easy compared to the people getting laid off. We had a very loyal team. Listen, I mean we were based in the Midwest in the US it wasn't typically a destination compared to the coasts and yet we were pulling in people from Sweden and Australia, [affirmative] who wanted to come work for us. And we had almost zero turnover at time when the economy had been really hot and do boom was happening. We never would lose anyone because it was a really good place to work, really good situation. And we were all really behind the vision so it was painful. But it is one of those things you go through at some point in business is you know, have your ups and you have your downs and you learn from both. And I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone, but I can't imagine being an entrepreneur for more than a few years and not going through it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about what you did learn from that experience and what you are doing now with Rosenfeld Media, what are some of those key learnings or experiences that have shaped the way that you have taken the direction with Rosenfeld that you have?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well I'd say one big theme common to both is a measure of healthy naivete. So I had no idea what I was doing when I started Argos, nor when I went full time and started hiring people. I guess I, I couldn't have been a total washout because we were able to succeed a degree but I really had no idea what I was doing. And I mean I started as a hobby and Rosenfeld Media Hobby [affirmative], I was making a living doing information architecture consulting as a independent consultant and had a lot of freedom when he was good. But I was not satisfied cuz it didn't seem consulting really could move the needle in significant ways with companies I was working with. It was very frustrating and I wanted to create something tangible and books are very tangible and you can actually say and point out here's how we designed it and here's why. Check it out, use it, tell me what you think.
- I think also information architecture has not only been obviously critical to a company like ar, that's what we were about as a consulting service, but every aspect of what we do at Rosenfeld Media is infused with ia. Whether it's the IA of our books, I mean that's kind of what I do for all of our books. I work with problems on structuring their content coming up in the narrative arc that makes sense. Labeling chapter titles so you can get a sense of that journey. When you look at the table of contents [affirmative], there's tons of IA that goes into books that's like, I don't even understand how it gets neglected by many publishers because it, it's the key to unlocking the content. It's even the key to writing the content. If you don't have a good structure as an author, it's gonna be a difficult journey for you, much less for your readers.
- Information architecture, for designing programs of conferences, same thing, narrative arc through lines, themes that crossover multiple days making sure that people's energy levels are considered as you think about the flow of how their time's gonna be spent. And especially now in virtual IA just pervades so much of not only the individual talks our speakers give and we work very closely with our speakers over months for every one of our conferences. But again how the structure goes over the course of multiple days. So there's a combination of IA and naivete and maybe those things kind of go naturally hand in hand who goes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You did speak about leaving I guess behind and moving into this independent consulting model and that it wasn't fulfilling and ultimately that led to your founding of Rosenfeld Media. Let's just go back to that time briefly cuz I understand that it was during that time you spent a lot of time on the road with Steve Kru and having recently spoken to Steve, he speaks very highly of you and I know from listening to some of your podcasts as well that you speak and think very highly of him. What was it about that time together on the road that was so special and that you enjoyed so much
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Stake
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- We would so what Steve and I did was Steve kind of helped liberate me from the Nielsen Norman tour. I was doing that I mean enjoyed that experience for about a year. But Steve and I decided we could just self-produce our own workshops. And this is at a time, there were very few UX related workshops and so Steve and I would do as many six cities a year where one of us would do our full day workshop and we'd go out for a steak dinner and the next day or another one of us would do the workshop and we would just basically handle things together in terms of finding locations and booking the business via using via my website and handling everything in a way that was just fun. And it gave us an excuse to go to a steakhouse in a different city night in between a bunch of times a year.
- And we made a good living doing that for a number of years. And Steve is just a fun person to spend time with and he's always been very supportive of work that I've been doing and in fact he's continues to be supportive. We're this, in the next few months we'll be putting out a book by Caroline Jar who's also a friend of both of ours, a very close friend of Steve's and he's just been so generous with his time working with her on her book, just volunteering because if you're gonna get free consulting from Steve Kru on your book, you take it. You don't pass that up. In fact, I will say that when we started publishing books at Rosenfeld Media, I did a fair amount of user research before we started especially on the design. And I learned through a number of sessions meeting with people in the field that the all time favorite book, this is nine, this is like 2006 or so, just don't make me Think Steve's book. And I dug into why and there were a lot of design features as well as the voice and tone that no one can ever really reproduce cuz Steve has a special Mac for creating really compelling content that we all envy. But we learned a bit from what he did and even worked with some of the same personnel to produce our earliest books. And so the DNA of Don't Make Me Think is in every Rosenfeld Me book.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that's a huge compliment I suppose to both of you having done that. And I also was thinking about my chat with Steve recently and I wondered how much of this generous consulting is a distraction from his own writing of his book about writing, knowing how much he loathes writing. I think it's probably he's doing himself a favor in that respect as well.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting to see what kind of cadence he works at on that book. Cause I've known Steve since the first edition of Rocket Surgery came out as well as all the additions of, don't Make me think Past the first one. And I know what he's like when he's writing a book. So [laugh] [laugh], let's all give some thoughts and prayers that he gets through the office.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm sure he will greatly appreciate that. Now Lou, I remember reading somewhere that you've said, and I'll just you now that my life's mission is to convene people, especially ones who don't normally find themselves in the same room. And looking at your history, looking at what you've been doing with Rosenfeld Media of late, you've done a lot of that over the course of your career. What is it about bringing people together that is so important to you?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Oh, you know, would probably expect me to give this wonderful answer about how it's good for humanity and whatnot. I won't, let me be honest with you, I do it for myself because my psychology for many years was I didn't feel comfortable in groups unless I felt like I really knew I belonged and the only way I belonged was to organize them, whether it was a softball team or baseball team back in college or high school or whatever it might be or happy hour, regular happy hour in grad school I used to organize because I didn't really feel too comfortable if I hadn't organized it. So isn't that sad? It's terribly sad, but it is the truth and it's not totally fair. I do getting people together. There was a movie that came out around 20 years ago called The Commitments. Did you ever see the Commitments?
- I have not Everyone should see the Commitments just because I think it's a great movie. And The Commitments follows the path of a young man in Dublin who loves soul music [affirmative]. And he decides he is going to put together the greatest Soul band Dublin's ever seen. And it's about his journey of finding a singer, a brass section, a bass player, guitarist, et cetera, et cetera, drummer and how these people, he had to find them in different places, how different they were actually for the most part, they greatly disliked each other, but he managed to get them together just for a little bit of time and they achieved greatness. Now, he wasn't a musician himself and I like getting people together, same way to be a band leader, to get people together who know a lot more about all aspects of UX design, certainly more than I do. I'm a generalist, but I love to get these people together and see what they can do even if it's just for a moment in time.
- I tried to do a lot of that and did some success first in the information architecture community helped start [affirmative] conference program the first two years of the Information Architecture summit, which is still going as the IA conference these days coming up actually pretty soon this month. And helped co-found the Information Architecture Institute, which is no longer but did some really great things in its time. I started something called User Experience Network, which also [affirmative] after eight years petered out, we never quite made it. And what I found is that people who start things, and I'm one of 'em, people like to convene things and convene people. It's great work and problem is we're not the same people who like to run them and sustain them at time. I'm certainly not. So I basically built Rosenfeld Media to be a business that sustains those types of things over time.
- That is almost a public private partnership. So we do a lot of things that are free. We have communities that are associated with each of our conferences. Membership is free and there's thousands of members and we have free content sessions every month, discussions, and then some small number of those people pay to go to our conferences. And it's a virtuous cycle. We learn from the community, we keep the conversation going year round in order to do a better job of programming the conferences and knowing who out there is a really strong presenter and what ideas are really germane to the community. And it makes such sense. I don't really understand why it's not more common. A conference is a polished snapshot of a conversation in the community. It's always happening. Why would you just helicopter in or parachute in for three days a year and then vanish? Why would you not wanna keep that going all year round? Now the challenge in that is that you have to get smart people who know each of those communities topic areas, let's say design ops. You have to have some design ops people who facilitate that conversation that's happening at scale in the community.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just spoke with Kate Tassie on that note and I said she's, yeah, right? Yep.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Yeah. So she was one of the people doing advancing research and we pay those people. So we have curation teams that organize these communities and these conferences and they do all the programming and they're paid to do their work. It's not a full-time job, but they are people from each of those communities who are respected and have good networks and getting people together and for bringing forward the conversation, the discourse and the learning. So that's our moment. I'm just the guy who starts it and then I get out of the way. I'm that guy in Dublin who couldn't play a horn or sing a note that loves that moment where they get together and a synthesis happens, things gel and it's exciting when it does.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about getting out of the way and how starting a movement or convening a conference is different to sustaining that. And I noticed looking through the Rosenfeld Media website that your brother Ed Rosenfeld has become the chief operating officer for Rosenfeld Media. What is it like working with your brother?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Let's see, I wanna strangle him on Mondays, Wednesdays. He wants to strangle me. Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays. We don't talk to each other at all. No, actually it's not really that bad, it's it. I've known him all my life. He's older and [affirmative]. We actually come from a family where we've had a history of family businesses and we're very aware of how that can be both great and problematic. And so we're very careful to constantly be talking about that. And we're also really different. He's got a fantastic mind for systems, which when you're in a small but highly complex business, I don't mean to, it's not something I'd brag about, but it is a really complicated business. Just for example how book distribution works globally in this age is unbelievable in terms of complexity. But he can wrap his mind around stuff like that I can't. And how we find people to curate and write and present and do all the other things we do is my thing. And I'm of the field and I have 25, 30 years of building those relationships. He doesn't. So that's a very good combination.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned that he was your older brother. What was your relationship like growing up and how has it changed to the present day?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well, ed is 10 years older than I am, so by the time I was least, he was already out of the house. And we have a pretty close family, so it wasn't like we didn't spend time together. But I mean 10 years is a big difference until you're into, I was into my twenties [affirmative]. Well I don't know that I like Ed as well as my young, the younger brothers in our family, five of us. But [affirmative] it's been really a pleasure to live in the same city which we have for the last 13, 14 years and have our kids get to know each other and to really hash out what a business this can be. It's a creative pursuit. One of the things that people who style themselves as creative sometimes fail to wrap their minds around as that things like a business is a very creative undertaking. And I think we both get that from different perspectives. So we just enjoy it and just fun to work on it together. If anything we have too many ideas. So that's the [affirmative] issue. We always have to beat those ideas down or we'll never get anything done
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Well it sounds like a very fun, rewarding and creative environment to be in and it's great to hear that as brothers you're able to make that work. And Lou, you touched on the fact that your family has had a history with family businesses and I understand that Ed had previously run the Rosenfeld family business before joining you at Rosenfeld Media. You also mentioned the importance of maintaining the communication between the two of you and you sort just touched on the difficulty that you can experience in family business. I wondered if you would just tell us a little bit about what the risks are and how you are actively managing that with Ed in order to bring Rosenfeld Media to even greater success.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well I think the main thing, and this is really true with any partnership, is you have to draw the lines of responsibility and accountability. But then you have to revisit them continually because anything else complex in the world a business is a complex system that's constantly adapting to an unbelievable array of variables that are constantly in flux. It's a moving target built on moving targets. And so what it is now is different than it was a year ago. Oh gosh. Especially after this last year. And it's different than it'll be what it'll be in a year. And so you have to have that line of communication open and that realization that you have to keep not only understanding what that business is but how you together need to manage it and how things change. So Ed started working with us as a consultant. That's a very different relationship that kind of naturally, organically grew into being a partner because we're open to it and the kind of work he's doing a year or two from now probably be a bit different than it is now as it will be for me. But we'll still be constantly looking at that boundary between what we do. And there's also things that are not so obvious who's doing what or who should be owning what. And [affirmative], again unless you're thinking about that together, talking about those liminal areas you're gonna be in trouble. So we make a point doing that and talking at least a few times a week.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So speaking of boundaries and responsibilities, I understand that one of the things that falls within your realm of responsibility is reviewing book proposals. For anyone that's listening to the show today or in the future what advice can you offer them? If they were thinking about sending you Lou a book proposal, how should they approach that?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- We're a little different than traditional publishers in the way we work. Our motto is collaborate iteratively or maybe should be iterate collaboratively. I'm still not sure about it, but we don't do a hundred books a year. A good year for us is like six books and they're very kind of handcrafted and we invest heavily in them in terms of, I don't just mean production and so forth. I mean editing in an ongoing way, what's called developmental editing where we have very close collaboration between a real editor while the author's writing and then the author. And we also start the conversation early on while the book is being written about what kind of research it needs, what kinda marketing it's gonna get, because we actually find that research and marketing are two sides of the same coin if done properly [affirmative]. So that is a prelude to or preamble to the fact that we do a lot and we don't scale very easily.
- A lot of it pulls down on my shoulders and a very small team, not 10 people. So it's a very small team and for that reason we're very selective and when people come to me with a manuscript I'm not interested may be a really good book, but we've not been able to collaborate iteratively on thinking about it together, thinking about the audience that's out there, thinking about how we best develop for that audience, thinking about how we'll research among that audience and market to that audience. And that has to be done over time. I don't really like to see manuscripts. A lot of people think I should be really thrilled. Hey, I've already written a book. It's not really how we work and it's nothing wrong with it. Many other publishers, that's how they work. It's just not our model. There's other things that I'm always a bit surprised by how people write books in ways that people in our field who really understand and empathize with other people, users, customers, they don't have that same empathy with readers.
- It's surprising and they write as if they are the important person in the book, their perspective, their experience. And a book is a polished version of a conversation, just like a conference program as I said earlier. How do you do that? You make the reader the hero and you think about where they are, how they feel. You may talk about yourself early on, but you pivot quickly to who you are, the reader. I'm the author, you're the reader. Who are we together? And if you can establish we that we have a rapport, you and I, you may not be as a reader in the room with me and synchronously telling me what you feel and what you think, but I should have done some research during the writing. Figure that out so that when you do read it, you feel as if I wrote it for you and that I understand your pain and understand your perspective and your context so that me can take a journey together throughout the rest of the book. That's the crucial piece of writing advice I would have to anyone. Whether they are pitching us a book or anyone a book or any other piece of writing or really even a presentation. It works really great for presentations. Get to we as quickly as you can by figuring out and establishing who you are and who I am. You the presenter or the writer and neither reader or the audience. Does that make sense?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And you have an equation I believe that encapsulates this message quite well. What is that equation
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Plus U equals we not rocket science, but it is still the sort of thing that many things it, it's not complicated but it still doesn't, it seems to fall out of the grasp of many people who pitch books our way at least.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's interesting hearing you talk about the fact that UX practitioners, when they come to writing a book about UX where naturally very good in our practice day to day of putting the user's needs front and center, but we seem to be less comfortable doing that when it comes to other things. It doesn't apply just to writing books. I also hear through my conversations with other practitioners that often that lack of empathy is found where when it comes to other stakeholders within people's organizations. So I think this equation's really simple and very powerful way plus U equals way of putting that front and center for people.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well I was just gonna say that a book is a product, so I think many people forget that maybe because books are so we're not I we're used to, we relate to books in a very special and sometimes exalted way that we don't really remember that they're ultimately products. And also when you are the source of content, it's a very weird feeling than when you are working with let's say a client who is behind the product. It's a different thing. I'm not trying to underplay how complicated and challenging this is, but it is not everyone can do it. And yeah I would just say seed is a product and then dust off how you would go about any product and that's maybe part of the key to developing a book that's successful
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. It also sounds like that's part of the reason behind your model of collaborating tatively on books. Because if you are writing a book, which is a product which is essentially your knowledge, which is you are the product effectively, you're just creating a manifestation of yourself and an artifact like a book that it can be difficult for people to get that distance and have that effective mirror or feedback mechanism. Is that something that has played out in your experience working? Absolutely.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- In fact, what that suggests is another good point. So I'm glad you brought it up that many cases I find that the author who's got the deep and authoritative expertise in an area is not the right person to write about it
- Because they don't have the empathy for one they can't really get the distance, they don't know what it's like to be new to the subject. Whereas someone who takes someone who's a good investigator as well as a good writer, someone who's basically a journalist who goes out and basically talks to the experts and synthesizes what they learn in a way that can be understood by a reader does a better job, [affirmative] I think those are the people, those who take the journalistic approach that really kind of not only have the empathy but they really engage the community around them and in effect make the people they talk to and do research to develop their content, they make those people into stakeholders. So I said a little earlier that research and marketing are two sides of the same coin. By that I mean while you're writing, you should be talking to people.
- The information shouldn't just come from you. You are not really the product, the community and its conversation that you maybe facilitate and take the lead in are the product. If you can draw people in to the process of developing your content, you make them stakeholders and the outcome. Those are the people who will write the Amazon reviews. Those are the people who will talk about how they had something to do with your work and how excited they are that it's now seen to light a day. They won't do that, by the way, if you forget to ask them for their email addresses and you running a survey, put something in at the end of the survey that says, when the book is out, I, I'd be happy to let you know and maybe send you a discount code or whatever.
- And so that's the difference between just doing the research and remembering that the research is also marketing. I, I've done this myself, that authors do it all the time. They forget to ask for those little bits of information to close the loop. They leave out that CTA and then they totally drop the ball on market. And so that's one of the things we do as a company, as a publisher, it's our responsibility to make sure that our authors don't forget that cuz it'll be a really a real shame if they can't draw those people in who are engaged in their work once the work is available, make them feel like you helped me and now here's the product. And that's critical to marketing a book.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is also an approach that you use at Rosenfeld Media. You mentioned it earlier, you have the conferences but you also have the communities. And those two things actually support each other in order to create a better product. And with the research and the marketing being two sides of the same coin, there's nothing that authors or practitioners should really be fearful of if they're actually contributing that value when they go to ask for an email address or ask for what might be considered a form of marketing as I suppose a way of continuing or closing that feedback loop as you've spoken about.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well, they don't even necessarily, it doesn't even feel like marketing. Marketing is like sales. Nobody likes to do it if you tell 'em what it is. But if you guide them in a way that's organic and natural, just do it because it's the right thing to do. So just like it's a good thing to let people know who've helped you on your book, that the book is now available or send them a copy. I used to find this at AR and we had fairly young people coming outta library school. I couldn't say, I need you to do sales when you're doing an engagement, you should be selling it to, we wanna get more work at Microsoft, we wanna get more work at ibm. That wouldn't make sense, but if we could put them in a position where they felt so good about the work and felt like they could actually achieve something in their work, they sold it naturally without even really.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's shift gears and talk about something else that I know that you are very passionate about, which is your strong dislike for silos. And you also seem to have a strong dislike for professional jargon. What do you think about the division that appears to be drawn at the moment within the UX and product community between researchers and people who do
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Research? Oh, that's interesting. Well, about the whole issue of silos and jargon. We have an elephant as a logo company because I believe passionately and lead off all my podcasts with the fable of the blind men in the elephant. And I, I'm convinced that to solve complex problems, to achieve rich insight, you need to have different kinds of perspectives, experiences, brains, ultimately mm-hmm [affirmative] toolkits, so forth. And to get to that, you have to put people in a position, you have to convene the band, we gotta get the sex player and the bass player and so forth. And if you have silos you don't make an effort. I mean it's hard for people to not be in silos, but if you don't make the effort to draw them together in smart, effective ways, it's a terrible investment to put together to hire all those people in the first place to what's the point if you are mm-hmm. [affirmative]
- Data scientists and your ethnographers aren't talking, it's a, that's malpractice, that's management malpractice. If you ask me and jargon's part of that and if you allow jargon to get in the way, first of all, you're reinforcing the priesthood in each of those silos. And I don't think progress is made when I'm with Martin Luther on this one. When we shield knowledge behind a priesthood and Latin or some other dead language that's inaccessible to people. So you have to getting past jargon and is one way in my mind, good managers are essentially the Rosetta Stones for their organizations. They're the ones who are translating and giving incentives for that crosspollination to happen. Now you asked about a specific case, namely researchers versus people who do research. And I know you talked to Kate Tassie so that you probably got a lot deeper, more nuanced perspective on it from her than I'll ever give you.
- But I will say this people do research versus researchers. Well there shouldn't be a versus in that phrase because they're part of the same ecosystem. People do research are the people. If you're a researcher, you want that. Yeah, I mean in the near term the people do research may screw things up. They may misinterpret what they learn, they may commit accidental malpractice of one sort or another In the long run they're gonna learn and they don't necessarily need to be researchers, but they will become the people that researchers actually can have success with cuz they get it. They don't necessarily need the researchers to do the very elementary research because they'll have maybe even done that themselves. But then they'll be able to go to the researchers for the really, really interesting challenging ideas and concepts and questions that go beyond the mundane and that's progress.
- If an experienced researcher's working in an organization and spending their time doing the very elementary setups of user studies and so forth, again, it's another form of management malpractice. If that same person is really being pushed to deepen their craft and to cross silos because they're working with different peers who have different deep levels of expertise, but they're also being pushed by in effect their internal clients, namely product people and other people who are know, knowing a little bit of research, that's when they're gonna do their best work. That's when they're gonna truly advance and make effective research in whatever setting they're working in.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It seems that we are in or about to enter a golden age of UX. For many decades UX was very fringe, but now almost every company seems to be hiring UX designers and researchers. Now that we have supposedly seen the value of research and design, what is the greatest challenge that we as a broad discipline face in helping our organizations to realize that return on the investment that they're making?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Greatest challenge in terms of realizing that investment? Yeah, I mean I do think it comes back to organizations realizing that the challenges they have are just induced by this kind of insane technology driven path that most organizations are on aren't gonna be solved by technologists,
- In fact they're only creating more problems and the complexity is just enormous. And it goes not to just design, but how humans behave with each other and all the ethical considerations that are part of that. And I mean, I just think about topics. We have a book coming out on this very shortly this month on conversation design and how just to have a conversation with people is something we don't even know how to do and we're trying to have conversations with things [inaudible] [laugh]. So there's just I think a realization that there are, there's so much more that needs to be figured out for the world to work if it's going to be technology driven. And it comes back to, as you're saying, you need more blind men to figure those elephants out. And what I keep wondering about is why we don't hear more about synthesis. So the blind men can talk, but until they put their evidence together, how they gonna figure things out And then synthesis should lead to insight to truth. And why we don't talk more about that. I've been, for example, on a mission to get data scientists and qualitative researchers talking on and off for eight, 10 years now. I still, how's that going?
- I'm on my last legs. But I do have a group of around a hundred and I have a Google group of about 130 people now that wanna do that, which is great, but most of them are qualitative people. They don't have the data scientists. And I see frustration, I mean it's not clearly I'm frustrated with things but I see so many people in these established areas, for example, market research. I know people who are frustrated with market research and the reason I know 'em is cuz they have reached out to learn and meet people from user research because they feel like the cannon of market research is basically defunct and morbid. And so they're frustrated. And I've seen the same thing happen in anthropology in ethnography and I've seen the same thing happen in information science and librarianship and I've seen it happen in HCI and visual design and you name it.
- And these people, these young Turks, these frustrated types are the ones who are so interesting cuz they're playing in the intersections and they're the ones who find themselves people without a country and that's where UX comes in or it doesn't have to be called UX, whatever the umbrella is of the moment, it's good enough by me at least. And I think they're the ones who are going to stay the one, they're the ones who figure out the important stuff. They're the ones who are realizing that they're blind men and they, they're seeking out other blind men. So I always try to find the, I'm looking for the data scientist still, I haven't had much luck, but I'm always looking for those frustrated outsiders who don't feel at home in their home field or profession. So I didn't really answer your question. I'm not sure I can to be honest, but this theme of convening people who come from these different silos is always gonna be important to me because I think it's going to, it's important for us all
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative], it really sounds to me that there's something almost about evolving the culture and that act of convening those people and try to create new opportunities and new possibilities across disciplines from that very act of bringing those people together. And it reminds me of something that you have wrote earlier, which was on your blog actually, and I'll just quote you now. You've said whether you realize it or not, you are constantly trying to define yourself, your resume, your portfolio, your skill set, your tribal allegiance, all will become moment prisons if you allow them to. Can you instead see these things as part of sequences, as unfolding stories of you? Tell us about that. What is a moment prison and how does that relate back to what we were just talking about?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Oh, well thank you for asking by the way, you're one of the most wonderful researchers when it comes to being interviewed that I've ever met you really, you've dug some nice nuggets out that I've forgotten about. So thanks for that. But okay, moment prisons what I was writing about in that article, which is a medium, is and you can Google moment prisons and it's like the only use of that phrase, I find it very frustrating being the veteran of battle after battle after battle between let's say the information architects and the frustrated young Turks of interaction design is split off in them about 15 years ago. And I guess there's no avoiding it. You are gonna have these splits and like I said, that's really interesting stuff ends up happening. But I feel like we get so wrapped up in the definitions and let's say, or the terminology, let's say the term information architecture was really valuable at one point and it pulled together in our book actually help people of all kinds of backgrounds and from different professions and really these different silos who all suffered from information problems and well they, there's too much, they didn't know how to manage it, they didn't know how to organize it, they didn't know how to make it findable.
- And until that moment they didn't have a common vocabulary or framework or concepts or term information architecture in this case to describe it. And voila, suddenly there was that and people could have conversations and that's half the battle, that's that Rosetta Stone I was talking about.
- And then suddenly information architecture didn't seem relevant anymore and we ring our hands, well what happened to IA and we don't use see that as a job title any longer and blah blah blah blah blah. I'm tired of that conversation and I have been for some time because we become so invested in these terms and these definitions that it becomes a millstone around our collective nets and suddenly we're fighting about this stuff when we should really be exploring together, well how can we build an even better Rosetta Stone? How can we grow our knowledge together? Instead we split into these ridiculous tribes, which I guess there's just no way around it, but we shouldn't. Then the new tribe is really interesting for a moment in time and it comes up with its own great idea, which then after a short amount of time becomes a prison.
- And that's what I mean by moment prison. So I see metaphors as moment prisons, we get caught in metaphors that we great for a moment and then become confining. I see definitions of professions that just can't keep up to date with the swirl of change that we face in this world and I feel like there's better ways to do it. You wanna understand a feel like interaction design. Don't define it with a ridiculous 20 words or so. Do something like look at a program for the interaction conference and then better yet look at it from year to year to year. But you can do pretty easily print those pages, those program pages off, take it. Those are each snapshots of something that's constantly moving. They are moments and if you look at them over sequence, you look at the conference program for last year and the year before that and the year before that and you will see change and that gets outta those prisons. That creates the connective tissue. I guess what I'm really saying is I think we ignore how important time is. Time is a raw material. The design's hands if only he or she will allow it and see it. And we get so stuck in that particular snapshot of a moment and we just totally miss out and how everything we work with is constantly changing and our designs and really our minds don't keep up with it cuz we are so locked in these prisons.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative], that's a really excellent time in this interview. Bring us down to the close and to my final question, Luke, which is thinking about what you have seen in your career to date and where the industry finds itself now, what is your greatest hope for the people who are working and what we currently call UX over the coming years?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- My greatest hope is that we will avoid the moment prisons obviously, and it's obvious stuff, I suppose, not stop learning. How do you not stop learning? Well, you keep looking outside, you're silo, you keep looking outside your team, you keep looking outside where you lived geographically and keep looking. You keep learning and you define what broadly enough that you give yourself not only enough flexibility and space, but really almost a mandate to yourself to learn beyond what you've learned. That's what I hope for.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Such an important message. Thanks, Lou. This has been a wonderful conversation. It's given me much to think about. Thank you for so generously sharing your story and your insights and for also your outstanding and continued contribution to the field.
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- Well Brendan, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity and thank you for such great questions. I'm really touched and honored, so thanks again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My pleasure, Lou. And for people who wanna find out more about you and Rosenfeld Media, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Louis Rosenfeld:
- I tweet from @LouisRosenfeld and of course @RosenfeldMedia is a pretty active account as well about what the company's up to we're. I'm pretty active in LinkedIn and of course rosenfeldmedia.com is our website.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great, thanks Lou. We'll be sure to post a link through all of those great websites and resources and the show notes and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you listen as well. As I mentioned, we'll be posting all the interesting bits and pieces in the show notes, including any resources that we've covered. If you've enjoyed the show and you want hear more of these great conversations with world class leaders and design, UX and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.