The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld
Summary
What happens when you mix together nearly 20 years of lovingly-created UX books, conference recordings, conversations, and much more? And fold in a well-designed chatbot to help pull all this curated goodness together? You get the Rosenverse—Rosenfeld Media's new membership platform that you can try today! Join Lou Rosenfeld for a quick tour of the Rosenverse, and bring your questions and suggestions.
Key Insights
-
•
Rosenfeld Media has curated UX content for over 15 years, including 60 books and 220 podcast episodes.
-
•
The Rosenverse is a membership platform with free and premium tiers, offering access to community events, Slack, and exclusive content.
-
•
The Rosen bot is a GPT-4 based AI that synthesizes Rosenfeld Media’s vast curated content to answer UX questions with sourced references.
-
•
The platform requires membership, even for free events, to streamline access and community building.
-
•
Quality of recordings varies, especially older community sessions, but they meet reasonable production standards.
-
•
Lou sees his role as a 'starter' who initiates projects but relies on the business infrastructure to maintain the platform long term.
-
•
Future improvements include deeper conversational UI beyond text input and output, such as clickable prompts for expanding answers.
-
•
Integration with other AI agents (e.g., IBM research bots) is envisioned to create a multi-agent ecosystem for research and guidance.
-
•
Slack remains an important but challenging community platform due to cost and conversation complexity for AI analysis.
-
•
There is interest in linking AI-summarized content directly to specific pages in books, though technical challenges exist in correlating vectorized text to pagination.
Notable Quotes
"I’ve been in the UX world for like 30 something years before we were even calling it UX."
"We took thousands of hours of curated content and built a chatbot around it so it’s not garbage in, garbage out."
"We do about a hundred free community sessions a year where anyone with membership can attend."
"The Rosenverse is a weird mix: it’s a for-profit business but also a neutral community resource."
"As a starter, I’m great at beginning things, but the company has the infrastructure to maintain them."
"Peter van D**e really pushed us to think about the bot as part of a conversation, not just a query-response machine."
"The Rosen bot gives you sourced, clickable links to books and videos, so you can dig deeper."
"Some early community recordings sound rough, but the overall error rate for the AI transcription is pretty low."
"Slack is growing steadily for us, but it’s hard to moderate and expensive at scale."
"Imagine a world where research bots at IBM talk to the Rosen bot to give you better guidance on interpreting research."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Willingness to pilot is not the same as willingness to pay."
Todd Healy Jess GrecoDriving Change with CX Metrics
June 7, 2023
"I start by going and talking to the people, the end users, and the subject matter experts who have been working in the field for decades."
David Cronin Uday Gajendar Peter Morville Kendra ShimmellDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"Designers want more time to prototype and really ensure what ships is successful, but we just don’t have enough people or time."
Kevin M. HoffmanTheme 2: Enterprise Team Journey
June 3, 2019
"The moment they begin to shift their thinking and make decisions based on that work, they’re actually giving you a seat."
Dalia El-ShimySo You've Got a Seat at the Table. Now What?
March 31, 2020
"If you want your question asked, please put it in the Slack channel, because I cannot keep up with the rapid things happening live."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldOpening Remarks Day 1
March 25, 2024
"It’s about making researchers, designers, cross-functional collaborators more efficient and more highly performant."
Jon FukudaTheme One Intro
September 8, 2022
"Creating shared coding schemes and having teams do first-pass coding helps maintain consistency in qualitative analysis."
Clemens Janssen Jane DavisEfficiently Scaling Research as a Team of One
March 28, 2023
"If you stop reading journals and practicing your instrument, you’re done as an expert."
Christian MadsbjergInfluencing Strategy
March 31, 2020
"Mobile is the first major platform where accessibility features are built in and mature."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
September 8, 2022
