Design a pipeline system where the best ideas rise quickly to the top and form the burnt sugar crust your team is going to crack through. You want to taste the sweet stuff underneath. So be ruthless! Let all of the other ideas-even the decent ones-fall away. Be flexible and take comfort: what might seem as wasted energy goes right back into your system as learned experience and improves the new ideas piping in.

With a marketing person, 90 percent of the time is spent trying to do everything to shape the buying decision," said Earl Powell, director of the Design Management Institute, a forum for industrial designers and the businesses that use them. Designers are "more committed to the user experience. That experiential component has an emotional resonance: It sticks

As mainstream media outlets struggled to contend with the enormity of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, citizen journalists were already on the scene filing a constant stream of reports and images from the ground.

On Twitter, hundreds of updates tagged "iranelection" appeared each hour. A steady stream of photos and witness reports came from one Twitter user, persiankiwi. He sat at his computer in Tehran, as friends fed him information on the protests. "We honour and thank the people of Iran and especially the hackers," he tweeted late on Monday. "Basij [the militia] have guns - we have brains.

Twitter has distanced itself from State Department revelations that it asked the company to delay maintenance so Iranians could continue to communicate.

The thinking behind this change was that by placing the call to action within the content area, with messaging specific to the location, and including the starting fare price, the call to action would become more relevant and people would connect with it and be persuaded to book a flight.

When asked to judge the usability and aesthetics scores of a series of ATM screens, 1 study found peoples' perceived usability scores were more closely related to the perceived aesthetics scores than the screens' actual usability. Further studies were able to replicate these results across cultures. The results imply people aren't able to distinguish usable and less usable objects, believing the aesthetically pleasing ones to be most usable.

The biggest challenge to better design isn't getting better designers. The problem is organizational, and the hub-and-spoke decision-making process that was originally created to slash bureaucracy--that is, to create more decentralized decisions and less hierarchy. But the overriding weakness, which design thinking makes manifest, is that good design is necessarily the product of a heavily centralized structure. Great design at places such as Apple isn't about "empowering decision makers" or whatever that lame B-school buzzword is. It's about awarding massive power and self-determination to those with the most cohesive vision--that is, the designers. Those are the people with the best idea of what customers want. That's the essence of "design thinking." If you were to summarize just how ugly--and self-defeating--the alternative can be, AA's Web site would be a smoking gun.

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?

User Centric, Inc., a user research firm based in Chicago, offers a glimpse into the battle between the newly launched Microsoft's Bing and the powerful incumbent, Google. Eye tracking technology was used to capture 21 participants' eye movements as they completed two informational (e.g., "Learn about eating healthy") and two transactional (e.g., "Book a last minute vacation") search tasks in each engine.

At times of crisis women are more inclined to spend themselves out of misery than at stable times, a new survey suggests. Psychologists say that the recession could force more women to overspend or increase their risk of mental illness.

Dr Peter Sozou suggests that individuals may have an innate tendency to care about the long-term future of their communities, over timescales much longer than an individual's lifespan. This in turn may help to explain people's wish to take action over long-term environmental problems.

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision

The results of the study clearly showed that those people who had feelings of fear evoked prior to seeing the ads were more persuaded by messages that employed the social proof appeal compared to a scarcity appeal or a control message. However the opposite was true for those who had their feeling of romance evoked before seeing the advertisements. The people in this group were more persuaded by messages that described features that were unique and scarce.

The harder the choice will be; and the harder the choice is, the more people make their decisions based on what choices are easiest to justify. In most cases, the easiest choice to justify is the one that favors function over form, frugality over luxury, and practicality over pleasure.

Mention the product or subject in the headline and don't play coy. The headline should flag people down. "If you are selling a remedy for bladder weakness, display the words Bladder Weakness in your headline; they catch the eye of everyone who suffers form this inconvenience."

Choosing among products can be more difficult if you tend to think more about the process of using an item rather than the outcome of the purchase

when people consider products for future use, "desirability" is a primary consideration. When people consider a product for immediate use, "feasibility" considerations become a priority. "For example, consumers who contemplate purchasing a new word processor for future use give great weight to quality-related features only, whereas those who consider purchasing it immediately attach importance to the feasibility of learning how to use it as well,

Given that consumers who bring to mind opportunity costs become more price sensitive, manufacturers of less-expensive brands interested in increasing price sensitivity may promote their products more effectively by reminding consumers to consider the opportunity costs.

In a recent usability survey, researchers from Southern Illinois University found that after ease of use, men prefer fast download speed to easy navigation. Women prefer ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility. The researchers hypothesize that these different usability criteria are due to differences in how men and women use the Web.