Outside Innovation

How Consumers Prefer to Pay for Online & Mobile Purchases

In the U.S. market, we’ve grown accustomed to the notion that we can buy anything, anytime, online. When we do, we usually are charging that purchase to a credit card—often one that is stored online.

Now that many people are using their mobile phones for everything while on the go, there’s renewed interest in mobile payments.

If you’re interested in figuring out how the new world of ubiquitous mobile payments will look and who the dominant players will be, don’t start with the U.S. market. It’s too backward when it comes to mobile phone usage compared to the rest of the world.

Is It Time to Change the Metaphors You Use?

Peter Horne, a longtime member of Patty’s Pioneers, always has an eye-opening take on subjects that most of us don’t even think about. As he contemplated the metaphors we use to describe technology and systems (windows, clouds, client/server) he realized that comparing complex concepts to easily understandable everyday objects helps us get our heads around all the complexity. It is human nature to try to simplify things; to put the elusive into familiar concrete terms. As Peter states, “The classic example is the ‘Window’ which explained the new idea of a region on a screen with some content in it. It's not a window – it’s a region on a plate of glass that has colored dots turned on or off based on the bits in the machine’s memory allocated to describe the location and color of the dots on the screen. But to call it a window works as a metaphor, and so we use it.”