The Grateful Dead's legendary performances, and the grassroots tape-trading network that grew around them, multiplied the band's fan base and generated a distributed archive that sustains their worldwide musical and cultural legacy. Nicholas Meriwether is head deadhead of the Grateful Dead Archive at U.C. Santa Cruz. He is devoted to using Web 2.0 user experience theory and practice to organize accessible collections of those memories.

What's the key facial feature of your design? That one element that grabs people on an irrational level, reflects the big concept, and becomes the icon for your product or service. Gretchen Anderson points to BMW cars' split grill, Tivo's big, bright "pause" button, and the Flip camera's flip-out USB plug as examples of successful facial features. Yes, strive for usability, but the most usable designs can be boring. Your design needs personality, too!

Web forms suck, but they can be delightful, if designers will adopt a new mindset and use the latest tools. Luke Wroblewski has studied rich interactions in Javascript to find the best improvements over plain old web forms. He suggests novel ways to use data collected where people already live, in email, IM, and web services, so no forms are needed. And he delights in new kinds of interaction possible on mobile devices, with their sensors, soft keyboards, and advanced displays. Today, web forms can be wonderful.

With several mobile device platforms in wide use, the designer's job is more complex than ever. Suzanne Ginsburg sorts it all out, proposing several approaches and giving examples and tradeoffs of each. Should you design a native app only for the iPhone? A web app that works on Android and Windows phones, too? Or should your design fall somewhere between, targeting only a few platforms? Or take a hybrid approach? Suzanne gives guidelines to help you decide and describes tools that can ease the designer's task.

If your confidence in healthcare is hurting, listen to this inspiring talk by pediatrician Chris Longhurst for a quick boost. Chris gives an intelligent and honest overview of technology adoption by hospitals, its huge benefits in reducing errors and costs together with its unintended consequences and how to manage them. Learn nine common problems that arise from healthcare IT adoption and take heart that we have smart, caring doctors like Chris to work through them, so patients can reap the benefits.

With each new social network, it seems social media becomes more important. With a lot of competition for our attention, effective user experience is critical. Erin Malone says we must focus on how people first interact with our designs, then carefully help them flow from one stage of participation to the next. Erin describes clear patterns that help social services ease people on board and encourage them to interact with others.

Building the right marketing strategy can be tricky if you see your customer only through a bubble of research. Peter Merholz strives to construct better models for understanding customers as something more than sheep, highly-rational Vulcans, or Type A personalities. Peter's case studies include connecting consumers to a financial services program and redesigning insulin pumps.

Do we know how to design successful social environments? Is "social experience design" understood as well as "visual design" or "interaction design"? Not yet, says Xianhang Zhang. He believes social design is still in its pre-scientific era: inefficient, error-prone, and unpredictable. Hang calls for a formal theory of social experience design and describes his own theoretical framework. As a first exercise of his principles, he is creating a Design Guild as a way to foster better designers.

Careful study of Amazon.com reveals design treasures of surprising value. Jared Spool has studied Amazon for years and developed insights into which design elements create more sales, and why. But he cautions designers not to copy Amazon blindly. Some features only work for the dominant on-line retailer. Some don't even work for Amazon, whose site is peppered with "dead soldiers," the remnants of abandoned experiments. Along the way, Jared points out funny effects of Amazon's automation at scale. Even those show Amazon has much teach us.

While much open source software suffers from poor design and usability, Firefox shines. What makes the Mozilla community different? With great branding, usability backed up by research but tempered by realism, and a powerful extension architecture, the Firefox web browser claims 400 million users. On the eve of the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg covers the unique challenge of coordinating user experience design in an open source community, important features of past versions, and the future of the Firefox interface.