Holly Rawson at Inphonic, a client of ours, helps to run and design wirefly.com, one of the bigger online mobile phone resellers. She came to my web design class at Towson and gave a critique on a 1st round of ecommerce designs my students did. Basically, she said she wasn't all that impressed with the formal aesthetic beauty of any of the sites she was shown, she wanted them to be more promotional and "selly", with buttons, badges, arrows and "flair" to catch people's attention.

You know what she means: the little star shaped badge that says "GREAT DEAL! BUY NOW TO SAVE 10%".

Classically, such high-falutin' designers as we scoff at such low-rent tactics, badges seem so horribly direct-mail-from-vegas. But there is a LOT of evidence that show they work. Anecdotally, Holly says that if you want to push a product, make the badge glowier, make it bolder and make it demand attention.

Design Meltdown puts it quite well: "It actually turns out that these little dudes do their job really really well, when used right of course."