UX: it's the little things

I was just reading an article in the NYT and inadvertently selected a word. A little icon of a question mark popped up and when I clicked it, it launched a new window with search results for the selected term.

It's little human-centered things like this that make for a great user experience. There were no instructions telling me about this, but it was discoverable, it was intuitive and it was helpful. The term 'design thinking' has been latched onto lately and you're sure to see loads of articles in marketing publications featuring it. Here's a great example of it.