Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot's Hood
Friday, June 14, 2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot's Hood
Speakers: Peter Van Dijck and Louis Rosenfeld
Link:

Summary

What happens when you cross an eager librarian, a happy puppy, and 800 UX experts? You get the Rosenbot—Rosenfeld's new GPT-4 level chatbot, trained on our books and hundreds of hours of conference and community call recordings. What went into creating the Rosenbot? Lou is joined by SimplyPut's Peter van Dijck, an old friend from the IA community and the chief architect of the Rosenbot. If you're beginning your journey into developing generative AI products, you'll want to join Lou and Peter to learn from their lessons, ask questions, and share your own thoughts on AI's role in making curated content more useful and impactful.

Key Insights

  • The Rosen bot uses curated, high-quality content from Rosenfeld Media to avoid common pitfalls of enterprise chatbots operating on messy internal data.

  • Significant project resources, around 30-50%, must be devoted to evaluation combining user tests, expert reviews, and repeatable automated metrics.

  • The chatbot intentionally avoids summarizing entire books to prevent cannibalizing book sales, instead acting as an entry point to authors’ original work.

  • Users and researchers often don’t know how they will use AI tools initially; the use cases evolve through interaction with the technology.

  • Building AI conversational agents requires embedding follow-up questions and memory simulation into the interaction design beyond a basic large language model.

  • Semantic search and topic analytics behind the scenes enable insights about conversation content trends and authors' influence in real time.

  • Balancing fresh, current content with older foundational material is challenging since methodologies and societal norms continually evolve.

  • There is a tension between jumping in to build and learn quickly versus cautious, deliberate product development; both parties in the talk appreciate different approaches.

  • Interactive UI elements like expandable answers and filters for broadening or narrowing responses are planned to enhance the conversational interface.

  • The Rosen bot acts as a creative companion and research assistant, helping accelerate idea exploration and uncover relevant historic knowledge efficiently.

Notable Quotes

"If you don’t jump in and learn, you’ll spend your time reading stuff on it and not really understand the tech."

"People forget the expertise every seven years and have to learn everything again—this bot helps make that expertise accessible."

"The content behind this bot is curated and high quality, unlike the typical confusing, outdated information in corporate repositories."

"We devote 30 to 50 percent of the project time just on evaluation with real users and experts to ensure quality and safety."

"The bot doesn’t summarize books because we’re a publisher and don’t want to cannibalize book sales—it points users to the original sources."

"We’re building in the attribution of ideas to authors and speakers, emphasizing the humans behind the expertise."

"Chatbots aren’t just the language model—they have structure around intent classification, safety checks, and session memory simulation."

"Sometimes you have to build stuff and learn from it rather than wait for the perfect moment or tools."

"AI in design can act as a creative companion, helping explore ideas and analyze past research more efficiently."

"The product is imperfect, probably about 60 percent there, but if we get to 80 percent it will be a compelling tool for UX content."

Ask the Rosenbot
Devon Powers
Imagining Better Futures
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Laura Weiss
Turn Down the Heat: 3 Ways to Handle Conflict in the Moment
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Malini Rao
Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Darian Davis
Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Jennifer Fraser
What would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
George Abraham
Design Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Taylor Klassman
Shaping the Next Era of UX Research: Collaborative Forum
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
The Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Daniel Gloyd
Designing Warmth
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jeff Gothelf
Innovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Michaela Mora
Advanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Chui Chui Tan
Global insights: Embracing international and intercultural research for innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sean Fitzell
Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Marc Fonteijn
First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold

More Videos

Sam Proulx

"I’ve been using screen readers for 30 years and accessibility has always been a passion of mine."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

December 9, 2021

Michael Land

"Most of our designers are contractors; they have limited voice because they’re bound by contracts."

Michael Land

Establishing Design Operations in Government

February 18, 2021

Shipra Kayan

"We stuck with NPS because it was a pure metric with a long history we could trend, instead of muddying things with loyalty or revenue."

Shipra Kayan

How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up

September 30, 2021

Ian Swinson

"Innovation is about being fearless, breaking rules, and refusing to stop at the way things have always been done."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Isaac Heyveld

"Emotional intelligence is key to navigating situations with senior leaders multiple grades above you."

Isaac Heyveld

Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff

September 8, 2022

Amy Evans

"Change is messy and it can be uncomfortable, much like baking bread—it’s hard to imagine sticky dough turning into a perfect loaf."

Amy Evans

How to Create Change

September 25, 2024

Kate Koch

"Super intelligence is the power to gather and share knowledge consistently to ensure no gaps in communication."

Kate Koch Prateek Kalli

Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX

September 30, 2021

Dave Gray

"Most enterprises are not emotionally safe places; people can’t just leave emotions at the door."

Dave Gray

Liminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations

May 14, 2015

Matt Duignan

"Durable insights can emerge organically based on usage and referencing patterns in the system."

Matt Duignan

Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap

March 30, 2020