Juhan Sonin gives a brief talk at O’Reilly Ignite about creating a practitioner’s guide to UI Design. The fast-paced talk speeds through many great tenets such as “Let Data Scream”, “Repeat Users Rock”, “Bitch Loud and Often”, and many more. For a more detailed look, check out his longer talk given at O’Reilly OScon, and also be sure to check out his ever-expanding website of publicly contributed design tenets.

Luke Wroblewski speaks at Mix ‘09 about the best practices of web form design. Covering everything from flow, layout, error handling, help, buttons, and more… Luke covers everything you need to know to design great web forms. And of course at the end he encourages people to not use forms at all. Overall, Luke presents a great practical guide backed up with lots of research and maintains the audience’s attention with the use of lots of great visual examples of both good and bad form design. Check out his book Web Form Design at Amazon.com.

In an on-stage interview at the San Diego Ad Club, Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky provides a behind the scenes look at many of the campaigns his company has worked on and shares some of his thoughts on various aspects of marketing. From Coke suing itself to Volkswagon’s Safe Happens, Alex has been constantly looking for ways to bring authenticity to messaging by “showing”, not “saying”.

Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky discuss the trends in today’s marketing and brand building. Specifically they discuss how integrating today’s culture of gaming is becoming more prominent in advertising and how they have incorporated the use of multiple forms of media to communicate brand messages. Lee Clow had famously worked on Apple’s advertising for years and Alex Bogusky is a rising star who’s worked on campaigns such as the Truth campaign and the Burger King games for the Xbox.

Scott Dadich, Creative Director at Wired magazine, talks about the design processes behind Wired at the IDEO Know How Talks. The in-depth descriptions of the cover creation process, font designs, infographics, etc… are fantastic and wonderfully juicy. “Details matter. Evolution, not revolution. Constraint is freedom.”

Aaron Forth, VP of Product at Mint.com, speaks at UX Week 2009 about the importance of user experience as it applies to managing personal finances with Mint.com. Aaron talks about tying the user experience to business objectives and how it influences everything from the people they hire hiring, creating their business model, and all aspects of Mint.com. Through several anecdotes Aaron talks about building the brand, building trust, and how the emotion of personal finances has a large impact on how Mint approaches design. A few of the most important factors have included the name, the light color tones, and framing the topic of finance in the light of ‘hope’. One of the most interesting insights was hearing how Mint.com chose to no longer support Internet Explorer 6.0 after discovering they were spending nearly 20% of their time working specifically to support it.

Adrian van Hooydonk, head of design at BMW, sits down an in an excellent interview with Tyler Brûlé of car magazine Monocle. The conversation leads down many threads including how BMW’s design thinking has changed recently, how they are always working to meet customer’s changing expectations, and the relationship between the drawing board and the driver. Big pushes for the company are happening in the way of being more environmentally friendly, meeting more of their owner’s needs and their lifestyle, and creating story narratives around vehicles as part of the design process.

ABC’s Nightline goes behind the scenes at Zappos to see why they have become the leading example in customer satisfaction and expose the company’s enviable corporate culture. By making investments in company moral, and customer satisfaction, their long-term vision has returned huge dividends. Zappos offers newly trained workers $2000 to quit and gives customers 365 days to return purchases with free shipping both ways. CEO Tony Hsieh has kept the call centers based in the US and says their number one focus is building the company’s culture. Whether they teach the practice in business schools or not, the proof is in the pudding. Also check out Zappos’ 10 Core Values.

An oldie, but goodie, Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research, speaks at Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction Seminar on topics discussed in his book Sketching User Experiences. A little more lengthy than his recent talk at Mix ‘09, Bill goes into greater detail about the importance of sketching in design. He also provides examples of how sketching can be applied to the design process in a meaningful way.

Industrial design and human factors legend Niels Diffrient talks at TED about his quest to design the perfect chair. In full director’s commentary, Niels shares how he redesigned a chair by looking at the human body in all aspects, including the user experience of using a chair.

Why can’t furniture fit like a suit?
- Niels Diffrient