experiences with Design Firm

At my work we decided to hire a design firm to develop a free mobile app with approx a few thousand potential users. It was an interesting experience. They did have some great ideas. They thought of interesting ways of integrating our services with other services, like google apis on android.

What I found missing was understanding of our target userbase. They did go through the motions of trying to understand our userbase. But most of the ideas they came up with were targeted towards young techie gen. At Qwest our userbase is mostly older non techie population. who has landline these days ? Also I wonder if they even understood the role of telephone at home ? Its a shared device. Its ment for the family. Its the number that you call to check back with the babysitter, or reach your family when you are travelling. These designer are from mobile generation. they think of landline as their "own" personal phone just an extension of mobile phone.

Anyhow I am not sure if some of the services that they came up with that got our product team all excited are that cool : geo based call forwarding. Syncing contacts between mobile phones and land line are good thing. ( contact syncing : will ending up syncing contacts between multiple cell phones tied to accouct as a side affect, geo based call following will lead to "phone" hijacking)