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Although consumers often value minimalist aesthetics, little work has examined why and when simple packaging designs of consumable products enhance consumer outcomes. The authors theorize that simple packaging evokes a symbolic association whereby minimizing design complexity signals that the product contains few ingredients, which increases perceived product purity and willingness to pay (WTP). A field study examining a supermarket chain's product packages (N = 1,353) provided preliminary support for this increase in WTP and two boundary conditions. Six preregistered studies replicated these effects and tested the underlying process. Studies 1a and 1b showed that the increase in WTP for simple packaging is driven by few-ingredients inferences increasing perceived product purity. Study 2 demonstrated the increase in WTP using an incentive-compatible design. Study 3 reinforced the proposed process via moderated mediation. Lastly, Studies 4 and 5 tested the boundary conditions in the field study, showing that WTP for simple packaging decreases when the product is from a store (vs. nonstore) brand and when consumers have an indulgence (vs. health) goal. These findings offer theoretical and managerial insight into minimalist aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When designing websites and planning marketing concepts, students need to understand how to create an experience that is user-friendly in order to build traffic over time. Users want a website that is both intuitive and informative, while simultaneously providing an ultra-efficient search experience. They want information that is essential and specific to them, for their own precise needs and purposes. The key to designing a successful interface is to meet the user's expectations of finding a suitable fact, product, or service expeditiously. Examining the case of Zillow.com, a highly successful real estate portal website, provides students with an effective example of underlying web design principles, such as user knowledge, ease of navigation, content adjustment, and the site's fit within the digital marketplace. Zillow.com exemplifies incredible ease of use through various aspects of superior web design, such as the accessibility and functionality of both of the top menu and submenu links and the ability to filter search results using data fields with key requirements, leading to instant, valuable results. By looking at what Zillow has done right, students can glean a set of best practices in web design that not only apply to the real estate industry, but can be translated broadly across websites in all industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• New fault-tolerant communication abstraction. • Simple implementations of read/write implementable objects. • Efficient implementations of snapshots and lattice agreement. This paper introduces a new communication abstraction, called Set-Constrained Delivery Broadcast (SCD-broadcast), whose aim is to provide its users with an appropriate abstraction level when they have to implement objects or distributed tasks in an asynchronous message-passing system prone to process crash failures. This abstraction allows each process to broadcast messages and deliver a sequence of sets of messages in such a way that, if a process delivers a set of messages including a message m and later delivers a set of messages including a message m ′ , no process delivers first a set of messages including m ′ and later a set of message including m. After having presented an algorithm implementing SCD-broadcast, the paper investigates its programming power and its computability limits. On the "power" side it presents SCD-broadcast-based algorithms, which are both simple and efficient, building objects (such as snapshot and conflict-free replicated data types), and distributed tasks. On the "computability limits" side it shows that SCD-broadcast and read/write registers are computationally equivalent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mechanical designers strive to create a simple design that will reduce product's cost and increase its reliability. This paper presents an experimental method for measuring the simplicity of a mechanical design. It also presents a quantitative metric for evaluating the simplicity of product design based on quantifiable design parameters. The simplicity metric was developed by using experts’ evaluations of functionally equivalent products. The dominant parameter for predicting an expert's simplicity rating is the number of features required to fully define the examined computer-aided design (CAD) model. This parameter is highly correlated with two additional measured design parameters: number of parts and number of interfaces between parts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]