The Research Design Associates Blog

Advertisers considering the mobile market will need to sharpen their strategy because mobile users won’t want to pay network charges for ads that don't interest them. Local based marketing sounds good in theory – use the GPS location of the mobile device to offer ads for businesses in the immediate area. But how many times do you want to see the grocery store ad when you're headed for the drug store? Push commerce – where ads are sent to the mobile device either through a subscription service or through local based marketing is a relic of the current technology. Pull commerce where mobile users decide what they want to see (and are willing to pay for!) challenges marketing and IT departments to work collaboratively.

A well-established national retail operation closed the bulk of its retail operations and transitioned – badly – to e-business. The products are available, but don’t get your hopes up. Two critical customer facing functions – address verification for shipping and secure hosting for credit card transactions – where the businesses relied on web developers without having a fundamental understanding of what the customer experience demanded. If the national company had invested in rigorous testing, the address verification problem would never had reached the final version of code.