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
Molly Fargotstein
Multipurpose Communication & UX Research Marketing
2019 • DesignOps Community
Jemma Ahmed
Theme Panel
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Bram Wessel
Enterprise Information Architecture
2020 • Enterprise Community
Etienne Fang
The Power of Care: From Human-Centered Research to Humanity-Centered Leadership
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Kristin Skinner
Theme 2: Introduction and Provocation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Dantley Davis
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
2020 • Enterprise Community
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 3: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Trisha Terhar
Empathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Frances Yllana
DesignOps–Leading the Path to Parity
2023 • DesignOps Community
Jeff Gothelf
The Intersection of Lean and Design
2019 • Enterprise Community
Roy Opata Olende
How Zapier Uses ‘All Hands Research’ to Increase Exposure to Users
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Shelby Switzer
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Anne Mamaghani
How Your Organization's Generative Workshops Are Probably Going Wrong and How to Get Them Right
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Matt Duignan
HITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
2019 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Daniel Gloyd

"Meisner taught actors to respond truthfully in the moment, prioritizing presence over preconceived ideas."

Daniel Gloyd

Designing From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research

February 12, 2026

Deirdre Hirschtritt

"Without good relationships, you won’t get good data. And without good data, you won’t have good project outcomes."

Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie Perrot

Research is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build

November 17, 2022

Benjamin Real

"After four years we were able to see in a concrete way what happened, the changes that we have been able to do for the organization."

Benjamin Real

Maturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy

October 1, 2021

Max Gadney

"If you think fossil fuel companies are going to help us solve this, then we probably have a very different idea of how this system works."

Max Gadney Andrea Petrucci Joshua Stehr Hannah Wickes

Assessing UX jobs for impact in climate

August 14, 2024

Lada Gorlenko

"Leading change in a century-old company is a very different challenge."

Lada Gorlenko

Theme 1: Intro

January 8, 2024

Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa

"I asked myself, will I take the leap or will I take permission? And this gamble paid off."

Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa

Play to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX

March 11, 2026

Bria Alexander

"Sponsor sessions are optional but offer incredibly high content, and they are not sales pitches."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

March 29, 2023

Llewyn Paine

"Blurring user faces loses context and doesn’t address voice privacy, making it an inadequate solution."

Llewyn Paine

[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings

June 5, 2024

Bria Alexander

"OKRs are not one-size-fits-all; you have to shape them based on your organizational context and culture."

Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie Goldthorpe

OKRs—Helpful or Harmful?

January 20, 2022