Deborah Adler at MIX09 Keynote

Bill Buxton, the Spirit of MIX09 (who, so I understand, now has a typeface named after him), returned for this morning’s keynote to welcome Deborah Adler, whose work as principal designer for Target’s ClearRx medicine bottles provided the focus for our discussion about design and its impact on user experience.

ClearRx Case Study

Deborah’s research identified and addressed many serious problems with traditional medicine bottles. Her prototype was refined by Target into the ClearRx products, and the resulting “return on experience” included brand awareness for Target — and, much more importantly, the potential to change behavior and save human lives.

Her advice to us was twofold – (1) to have a love affair with our customers, and (2) to bring our design skills to bear both humanly and humanely.

There is more about Deborah’s work at the Target:Health site.

[Update: I just saw Robby Ingebretsen's post and agree with him - these two MIX09 keynotes together (and particularly, Deborah and Bill's contributions) were the best and most inspiring MIX keynotes yet.]

Clear Rx (link goes to Target ClearRx site)

IE8: In other keynote news, Dean Hachamovitch announced that Internet Explorer 8 was released today.

For more info: You can now watch streaming video of the keynotes (for both days) here, and Tim Sneath’s thorough Play-by-Play is here and here.

The Cloud?

So I expected today’s keynote was going to be about the Cloud. I was totally wrong.  Clear skies.

My Keynote Mind Map, with Day 2 on the bottom, now makes more sense: the “Return on Experience” discussion provides the roots for everything we’ve discussed at MIX09 this week.

MIX09 Keynote Mind Map - Days 1 and 2 - with Return on Experience at the root

p.s. More Misc MIX notes on the rest of Day 2 in a future post — I am shattered tonight. Johnny Lee’s HCI talk was particularly memorable (link goes to his killer TED talk).

[Quick update: you can download the IE8 Beta here.]

I know that this conference is fundamentally about connected systems, and the web browser is a vitally important component.

But I thought this was a profoundly boring way to begin the technical announcement part of the keynote.

At first I was like “meh,” but then there were a couple of great demos that redeemed this segment, which I’ll mention after listing Dean’s 8 new things about IE8:

1. CSS 2.1
– of all the w3c working groups, this one should have the most impact

2. CSS Cetification
– 702 test cases made available under BSD license to w3c
- by default, IE8 interprets content in the most standards-compliant way

3. Perf
– much improved, esp. JScript related to strings

4. HTML 5 Start

5. Dev Tools
- set breakpoints in IE using “Developer Tools” . You can add a watch, there’s an immediate window, CSS style tracing and more.

6. Activities (integrate site into rest of web)
- “Smart-tag” like activities when you select, e.g., an address, a product that we can find on ebay, etc., without having to leave the page (using a hover-over window)
- very easy to extend

7. WebSlices (deliver user-specific content)
- allows me to subscribe and interact to portions of a page that interest me.
- examples: an ebay auction, the Facebook status
- dev experience: just add a div to the page, no need for a separate feed

8. Beta1 for Devs available after the keynote
- Get IE8 Beta here

My initial thought on this part of the keynote: IE8 does NOT make for an interesting demo. Why is this where we are starting our day?!

But then the things that engaged me:
- Showing IE8 responding to “Network Connection Lost” — and support for DOM storage
- Dev Tools built in to IE8 for setting breakpoints in code, adding watches, immediate window, CSS style tracing, and more.

Already available: First look at IE8 Activities and WebSlices

So in summary