“Ranging from colorful buttons and pointers to touch screens and gestural feedback systems like the Wii, these user interfaces inform the way consumers learn and even ‘talk’ to a product,” she says.

Too many companies, she says, have marginalized product design. When it comes to marketing, most firms focus on form and function and may emphasize brand and price. But the consumer forms all kinds of perceptions about a product’s usability even before she ever picks it up. “User interface design is one of the key drivers of consumers’ purchase intentions and willingness to pay,” Ibrahim says. “I would like companies to build bridges between the marketing and design teams.”

Apple, creator of the iPhone, is an example of a company that understands the connection between user interface design and marketability, she notes. The cell phone industry at large, however, has a huge challenge when it comes to UID: Many phones are returned after purchase, and the majority of cases involve usability problems. The situation, called the “no fault found” phenomenon, offers a classic example of the way UID affects consumers and companies alike. “When a product is returned, it becomes a marketing problem,” she says.

Ibrahim studied electronics and communications as an undergraduate in India and completed an MBA in international marketing. She worked for an engineering design services firm for eight years before returning to school for a doctorate. Now she uses specialized software to make 3D models of product concepts for use in her experiments. She’d eventually like to expand her research to include automotive UID and also take a look at the way user interfaces influence the way people interact through social networks.

Manoj Agarwal, professor of marketing at Binghamton, says Ibrahim is exceptionally self-directed. “I can talk to her at a high conceptual level,” he says. “She also pushes me a lot, which is good. She’s full of ideas.”

Agarwal says Ibrahim has been able to integrate ideas from numerous disciplines in her work, including engineering, marketing and even organizational behavior and leadership. He believes that understanding UID will be increasingly vital in the next few years, as information and entertainment move to cloud-based systems and touch screens become more prevalent.

Ibrahim, who hopes to pursue an academic career after she earns her doctorate, says her work is driven by what she sees in the marketplace. “This is something you can see and feel in your daily life,” she says. “It’s important that these ideas should reach consumers as well as researchers.”

Wang, an associate professor of marketing at Binghamton University, studied the effects of user comments and sales statistics that accompany products offered on e-commerce sites. While the impact of positive and negative feedback has been well understood, much less was known about so-called “observational behavior” data.

Observational behavior refers to a person’s tendency to adopt the same habits as his or her peers. “Households make decisions by following what they see their neighbors doing,” Wang says. “People learn from their peers what to buy.”

For online marketers, word-of-mouth recommendations are displayed in the form of customer reviews. If the site also reveals statistics on how many users purchased the product, the shopper also can be influenced by observational behavior.

Wang analyzed data on 90 brands of digital cameras from Amazon.com, which includes a section disclosing the percentage of people who bought the product after viewing it. She and her colleagues found that positive observational behavior data boosted sales, while negative observations had little influence.

The results dispel a myth in e-commerce that consumers are likely to be discouraged if they see a low percentage of peers following through with the purchase.

“It’s good news for manufacturers who haven’t had a lot of people buy their product,” Wang says. “If it’s a niche market just targeting a small group of consumers, they don’t have to worry because there is no harm in releasing this type of information.”

The findings were published in the Journal of Marketing Research.

Juanjuan Zhang, assistant professor of marketing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has cited Wang’s findings in her own research exploring the observational learning phenomenon. “This is a new, interesting and important result, which could be highly valuable to companies that want to manage the market consequences of word-of-mouth and observational learning,” Zhang says.

The research, Zhang says, “disentangles the effect of word-of-mouth and observational learning using a very clever natural experiment.”

Wang also identified a synergy between the two concepts. “What’s most surprising is the interactions of word-of-mouth and observational learning,” Wang says. “They strengthen each other.”

Previous market research indicated that consumers often dismiss highly positive product feedback, realizing that a person writing favorable comments may be biased. Highly critical product feedback is viewed as more reliable. For observational learning, the opposite is true.

“Negative word-of-mouth affects people more than positive word-of-mouth. This is not new,” Wang says. “With our study, we are the first to show the influences of observational learning. This is very important to companies thinking about what types of information can be posted on their websites. Our study gives them the evidence.”