Jensen Harris, in 90 minutes of awesomeness, talks at Mix ’08 about the design process which led to the creation of the ribbon toolbar which appeared in Microsoft Office 2007 and has become a widely used design pattern. Revealed in the talk are many prototypes of early designs as well as the story behind the ‘ribbon’ name. Jensen still works at Microsoft and is now working on Office 2010.

Rob Ingebretsen, part designer and part developer, speaks at Mix 2010 about lessons he has learned over his roughly 10 years of experience as a designer. A few of these include: Starting a project by creating a ‘mood board’. Having a theme to unify the functional and visual aspects of a design. Be better before you are new. Learn lots of techniques. Sweat the details. As well as to follow an iterative process of working hard, get feedback, and refining. Rob is one of two designers at Pixel Labs and runs a good design blog at NerdPlusArt.com.

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.

Bill Buxton Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences, takes the first 30 minutes of the MIX ’09 keynote. One of my favoUrite speakers, Bill talks about the importance and power of sketching user experiences. Citing many examples, Bill stresses the importance of experience design in a bad economy and thinking about the transitions between states and not simply the states themselves.

These things are far too important to take seriously.
- Bill Buxton