Marketers have long been aware that irrationality helps shape consumer behavior. Behavioral economics can make that irrationality more predictable. Understanding exactly how small changes to the details of an offer can influence the way people react to it is crucial to unlocking significant value—often at very low cost.

The secret to winning fans and pleasing customers might just be simplicity of design. We talked to a trio of user-experience pros about how they create intuitive (and highly successful) products.

Conveying user research findings so people can understand them, believe them, and know how to act on your recommendations can be challenging. And providing enough detail without boring your audience is a difficult balance. But there are some best practices in communicating user research findings that can make them more effective—and even entertaining.

The Scent of a Site: A System for Analyzing and Predicting
Information Scent, Usage, and Usability of a Web Site

Instead of investing more in innovation process or cultural transformation, I'm observing more large organizations giving greater resources and responsibilities to ever-smaller teams. Innovation initiatives that were once handled by dozens a decade ago are now run by only handfuls. The median size of the core innovation group has dropped from a football/soccer eleven to a basketball five. Less apparently enables more.

moleskin pencilHolder

Option Tree Video Walk-Throughs

If the presentation of your content is attractive and easy to follow, visitors will likely stick around to read what you have to say, no matter where it is located on the page.

Our model is different than most, and I consider this to be a good thing—but it can be a challenge to define what we do at a cocktail party or in an RFP. But if you change your perspective and think about what we do versus what service we provide, brand engagement is the “no duh” answer.

ClickTale, for me, is one of the best tools to use when you want to improve your website performance. However, it is difficult to find any guides on how to extract insight from the videos and heat-maps you are seeing

The most powerful messages you can use to build your brand are both highly relevant to your target audience and very distinct from your competitors. These are your brand Drivers. Identify them and focus your brand around those. If you can’t find anything you deliver today, then you’ve got some work to do if you want to have anything to talk about tomorrow.

The Fogg Behavior Grid describes 15 ways behavior can change.

The process hinges on three steps: Defining the situation, searching for cliches, and twisting those cliches around, according to Luke Williams.

Google Analytics can really be a valuable tool for user experience designers

Agile does not mandate how to define concepts or overall design direction, but it is a great way to execute on solid design research and well laid plans. UCD needs to be flexible enough to respond to the reality on the ground when the implementation team encounters issues that mandate a different design solution. Document only what is needed to get the message across and co-locate if at all possible, because cross-disciplinary collaboration and face to face communication are vital. Working a sprint ahead of the development team is helpful in allowing the design team enough time to test and iterate. If these rules of engagement are followed, the two approaches can work very well together.

Video of a new kind of ATM from IDEO

How Starwood Builds Emotional Connections and Brand Loyalty Online

Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.