Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

I read several usability and search blogs on a regular basis (Jeff Croft, A List Apart, 456 Berea Street, Matt Cutts, etc.), but UXMatters is consistently one of the best I read. And when worlds collide of search and usability, I’m especially interested. This article discusses using location and location based information as part of the information display, filtering, and user interaction processes. A great read, but it got me thinking about the future of mobile web and what it could mean for me walking down the street one day with my cell phone.

Very Near Future Me
As I’m strolling down the street, I walk by a restaurant and open my phone/mobile device to see a message from the restaurant itself (opt-in of course). After doing a quick lookup of my phone number it says “Hey Jeff, come on inside. Lunch special today: Roast Beef Sandwich, $4.99.” As excited as I am about a roast beef sandwich, I click on the name of the restaurant in the message to get their Yelp page, just to make sure it’s a decent restaurant. I like the reviews, why not give it a shot.

After lunch, I walk outside, take a quick picture of the restaurant, add it to Flickr with some tags for “delicious sandwich”, Yelp with a positive review, and my blog. Other folks, ready for lunch, see the posting on my blog and head out for the same lunch special. I hit “locate” on my phone and see where all my friends are instantly. Everybody’s busy so I head over to Borders to see if they have that DVD I was looking for. Once I get there, I take a picture of the UPC code and it instantly pulls back the price of the DVD and the price of 5 other retailers, online and nearby.

Soon enough

image courtesy of Sufjan Stevens