Don Norman, one of the fathers of user experience (now 75 years old), gives an excellent talk at Business of Software 2009 on the ten rules for successful products. Throughout the talk, Don stresses the importance of creating positive experiences with many anecdotes and provides many tips along the way. For example, make sure to have a strong beginning and strong ending to an experience, because that is what people remember. By placing the undesirable or painful parts in the middle, even if that requires creating a false beginning or ending, people will come away with a more positive memory of the experience. And it is that memory that they will share with others and remember long after the actual experience.

The 10 Rules:
1. It is all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don’t be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is okay
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It is all about the experience

Eddie Harber, product designer at the Apparel Innovation Team at Nike, gives a behind the scenes look at the Nike Pre-Cool Vest. Made from lots of recycled materials, the vest is designed to be filled with water, frozen, and worn prior to an athletic event or workout to keep the body’s core temperature cooler longer. It is great to see how such wonderful form is derived purely from function.

In “Deep Dive”, a now legendary episode, ABC’s Nightline goes inside IDEO and follows their design methodology while having them design a shopping cart from the ground up. Filmed in 1998, the video is still shown in design and business schools around the world. Although the IDEO Shopping Cart was never built as is, stores such as Whole Foods now utilize aspects of the design in their own modular mini-carts.

Designer Ross Lovegrove expounds his philosophy of “fat-free” design and offers insight into several of his extraordinary products, including the Ty Nant water bottle and the Go chair.