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
"Some of the most important decisions for service design happen on whiteboards among engineers, often without service design representation."
John CutlerOxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)
December 3, 2024
"Creating a roadmap built enough space to make meaningful design changes for developers to implement."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"Our communications is all over the map — email, Slack, Hangouts, face-to-face, GitHub — it surfaced some gaps we didn’t fully appreciate before."
Dave GrayGroup Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
November 7, 2017
"You wanna capture all the mess, but you cannot operate in the mess. Leave a path back to the mess so details and signals remain available."
John CutlerThe Alignment Trap
November 29, 2023
"Diagramming is kindness we give to ourselves and others to get our bearings on things we’re stuck on."
Abby CovertStuck? Diagrams Help
October 27, 2022
"We started to build an API for how other teams could interact with us like a contract."
Mark InterranteCollaboration Flows in Product Development
June 9, 2017
"Trend forecasting is a culture industry—it produces culture as much as it predicts it."
Devon PowersImagining Better Futures
March 9, 2022
"Share your learning quickly and often—don’t wait for big reports. Your deliverable as a designer doing research is the design itself."
Prayag NarulaHow to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To
June 10, 2022
"Despite the worst user interface ever, cloud code is the most popular and successful agent that exists today."
Peter Van DijckHands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
October 22, 2025
