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Imagine that one day you are reading an article in a magazine that describes an account that is rather worrying. In fact the article is written in such a compelling and engaging style that it arouses a strong response in your emotional feelings. On finishing the article you turn the page and see an advertisement for a product billed as "The #1 Market Leader". Could the emotions you are still experiencing from the story you have just read effect the persuasiveness of the ad you are now looking at?

n this article, we contrast the "sales cycle" and related models with the "experience cycle" model. The sales cycle model is a traditional tool in business. The sales cycle frames the producer-customer relationship from the producer's point of view and aims to funnel potential customers to a transaction. The experience cycle is a new tool, synthesizing and giving form to a broader, more holistic approach being taken by growing numbers of designers, brand experts, and marketers. The experience cycle frames the producer-customer relationship from the customer's point of view and aims to move well beyond a single transaction to establish a relationship between producer and customer and foster an on-going conversation.

The book never emerged from the bag. I was too busy with my internet-connected mobile phone: sending messages to friends; reading articles after clicking on links they'd sent; even looking at a couple of pages of a Sherlock Holmes story which I have stored in an application on the phone. Which brings us to the oft-asked question - is the internet killing the book?

In this article, we'll take a detailed look at the design, layout and usability of Craigslist and point out some areas where we feel change and improvement are possible. This is only one opinion of what could be done to improve the site. Our goal is to demonstrate the process of evaluating a website in certain areas and determining specific improvements that can be made. Hopefully this will help other designers who are attempting to evaluate websites of their own or of clients.

In this article we're going to break down the page fold myth and give some tips to ensure content below the fold gets seen.

The neuromarketing takeaway is simple: a face in your ad will attract attention, but be sure the face is looking at what you want the viewer to see!

The neuromarketing takeaway is simple: a face in your ad will attract attention, but be sure the face is looking at what you want the viewer to see!

When we developed our web usability benchmarking tool - a tool to measure web site usability and directly compare the usability of one web site with another - we knew that collecting the data was only half the battle. We knew that companies don't act on usability data unless senior management are swayed by the findings. So we set to work devising a way to present the data in a format to help them managers engage with the data.

The vast majority of iterations are never seen by anyone outside the team. So, it looks to the outside world that, when a great product comes out, that the team just sat down, thought it through, and built it, without any trial or errors. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

The woman was a "Jill," code name for a soccer-mom type who is the main shopper for the family but usually avoids electronics stores. She is well-educated and usually very confident, but she is intimidated by the products at Best Buy and the store clerks who spout words like gigabytes and megapixels.

Brad Anderson, chief executive officer of Best Buy Co., is embracing a heretical notion for a retailer. He wants to separate the "angels" among his 1.5 million daily customers from the "devils."

The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to "easy to use," but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability - effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn - helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.

"[With eyetracking] we can see that a user may navigate the page of an interface that houses the info she wants," she said, "but if the text is poorly presented, or the navigation is cluttered, or there are too many superfluous images so she cannot easily find what she needs. This is a lost opportunity.

Requiring prospects to register for content is a standard B2B lead gen practice. But what if your audience is rather old-school and not used to signing up for content online? Listen to a marketer who knew that promoting a new product to a traditional audience required a demo of its value and a voluntary registration form to avoid scaring away prospects. Almost one out of four (23%) demo viewers were converted into leads.

What is fundamentally different about the recession, except for the ones we had in the 1930s, is that we're putting bookmarks in our brains. When icons that we defined as stable, like Lehman Brothers, fall apart, you are suddenly questioning everything around you. So consumers now, if things start to get better, will not run into the stores and start consuming like there had never been a recession. That will not happen. At the end of the day, consumers will want something practical that will enhance their lives in concrete ways. And that's really a fundamental change from the past, right?

First, people aren't really interested in what we do; they're interested in the results that we deliver. Second, running around and selling things is not as effective as actually applying your design skills to problems that matter. In many ways, business people look at things and size up the problems. They may avoid complex variables - the who, what, where - simply because they are complicated factors.

Research released recently confirms that taking a 'one size fits all' approach to retailing is no longer relevant in a highly competitive environment where the mass market has been replaced by increased fragmentation amongst consumers. Providing a standardised retail offering to large numbers of people is no longer appropriate for consumers who are increasingly demanding a more tailored and individualised service.

When the economist's guidance was available, choices were powerfully affected by this expert's advice. The reason was revealed in the brain activation patterns of the participants. In the presence of expert advice, the areas of the participants' brains linked to critical thinking and counterarguing flat-lined.