Better Know A Speaker: Lou Rosenfeld
August 23, 2007
Information architect. Book publisher. Bringer of polar bears. And now search engine analyzer. Lou Rosenfeld is all of these things, and more. Coming from a background in library and information sciences, Lou has been a driving force in helping make sure that we can find all the information we’ve been throwing onto the web. That passion has led him down some surprising pathways, as we found out in a short conversation.
Who or what has had your attention of late?
Besides the final season of Deadwood on DVD?
I suppose it’s the daunting process of book production. My new company, Rosenfeld Media, is publishing its first book, “Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior,” by Indi Young, a founder of Adaptive Path. Liz Danzico and I are up to our ears in all sorts of pesky details, some conventional–like cover design and setting pricing–and some not so conventional, like user testing the design of both the print and PDF versions of the book.
Fortunately, many skills picked up through years of web design–as well as many newer web-based tools, like Basecamp, have made the whole thing much easier. And once we nail our process, each new book should be much easier to produce. At least that’s what we keep telling ourselves…
Tell us a little bit about Rosenfeld Media and what you hope it will become.
Rosenfeld Media is a new publishing house that focuses on short, practical books on user experience design. We’re different in that we’re eating our own dogfood: we’re applying the user experience design thinking and methods covered in our books to building our company and its business model, determining which books we’ll publish and how those books should be designed, and engaging readers in content development as much as possible. We have five books underway, and Indi Young’s book, due this fall, will be our first publication. If you want to know more, or have a book idea of your own, then please stop by for a visit!
It’s probably fair to say most of our audience knows you for the book “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (a.k.a. “The Polar Bear Book”), yet you’ll be presenting “Search Analytics For Fun and Profit” at An Event Apart Chicago. Does this mark a radical shift in career course, or is it all part of the same subject?
It’s evolutionary. Poring over search queries is yet another way to understand what kinds of information users want, which is something of a prerequisite to designing a decent information architecture. Peter Morville and I covered the topic briefly in the third edition of the polar bear book, and now I’m digging into it further with a new book, “Search Analytics for your Site: Conversations with your customers”. Rosenfeld Media will publish this one as well; we’re targeting the end of 2007.
What do you hope attendees will take away from your talk?
A deep and abiding sense of respect for internal search analytics. Seriously. Rich Wiggins and I are writing this book partly because we’re shocked at how few web professionals bother analyzing their sites’ search queries. Your search engine produces vast quantities of query data: your customers are telling you what they want in their own words. Why not take advantage of this data–which is real, and which you already own–to diagnose problems and better serve those customers? We’re uncovering all sorts of practical, concrete benefits from search analytics, and I hope to introduce them at my talk.
