iPhone Apps: Designing a Better Experience for QR Codes

Last weekend I was trying several applications to read QR Codes with the iPhone. They all do the same thing but the experience using them is very differnt. I would like to share with you my conclusions.

What are QR Codes?

They are two dimensional bar codes that store some information like URLs and addresses. In some countries they are widely use in the advertising industry to give links to additional information.

A QR Code:

QR Code Example

QR Code Reading iPhone Applications

I was trying four of the most popular QR Code reader applications for iPhone:

QR Code Reader iPhone Application Icons

 

Understanding the aim of QR Codes and QR Code Readers

In order to design a better user experience you have to think what the QR Codes are for and in which context they will be used:

- QR means Quick Response, so they should be decoded fast by the code reader. That is, not only decoding, but also the application should be ready to read the code as soon as the user starts it. 

- QR Codes are used in advertisement a lot, at the street and in magazines. They do a good job because they meant to save time as the user does not have to type, for example, a URL address while she is walking or not using a PC.

 

Three of the four applications I tried don’t care about the previous two points. For example, 2D Sense does a great job decoding QR Codes but it fails to provide a good experience. The user needs to read and decode the QR Code fast but the application bothers with a welcome message and tries to get access to the location information, both things totally unnecessary.

You don’t need to know my location to decode…

2D Sense Application Screenshot

Barcodes, BeeTagg Reader and 2D Sense do a great job decoding but they bother with welcoming messages and other unnecessary options. On the other side, UpCode allows the user to shoot at the QR code directly without loosing time, exactly what is needed to make the QR Code reading user experience good.

UpCode, start the application and shoot straight away.

UpCode Screenshot

I want to point out how a good design could make an application better than other similar ones. Always go for the simple design without features the user in that situation don’t need.

What the Crisis is Doing to Usability: Explosion of Abusive Advertisement

The crisis is making web companies to struggle and they seem to be doing whatever they can to get more revenue (thing that I totally understand). These are particularly hard times for companies living on advertisement, like online magazines, newspapers and others. In the last months I have seen an increase in pop-ups, videos and other forms of excessive online advertisement around the world.

In the picture below, showing the website of an important German newspaper, you can see how two ads are competing for the user’s attention. This is embarrassing for the website and advertisers, and very disturbing for users.  

Frankfurter Allgemeine Screenshot

 

As this is bad for usability reasons, the whole perception and user experience of the website gets affected:

- Users have to close ads before getting to the content (the most important of an online newspaper).

- They might click on the ads while trying to close them. The website gets the money… and an irritated user too!

- This kind of advertisement could be really bad and cruel for people with disabilities and difficulties to move the mouse with precission.

Whenever you can, try to avoid abusive advertisement as much as possible, it’s not only about usability, it’s going to affect your credibility and might make users to flee to another website.

Usability Issues of Adding Video to a Website

Using video in a website is a whole issue, there are several usability problems we have to take care of at the moment of designing a website. I would like to tell you about a website I launched recently: it’s the Biccu Table website, dedicated to the presentation of a table design.

The Biccu Table website needed to be very graphical inorder to easily explain how the concept works and what is the table for (it’s a table for children). So we went for a video, making it the center of the website. Of course this brought some problems to the design…

 

The Biccu Table Website Screenshot

 

Technical Issues

We got a few messages from users (actually 2) saying that they were not able to see the video. One thought that an Apple computer was needed and the other one said that the computer crashed several times during playing time. In our case this was a minimum amount of complaints in comparison to the big amount of positive feedback. But this is a warning, if you are targeting poorly technically-skilled users, keep in mind that playing video represent a challenge for some of them.

 

The Text

Every video, specially the ones with sound, should have an explanatory text giving information to the people that are not able to see the video (for example, visually impaired ones or for technical reasons). In our case, we noticed that the people were concentrated on the video only. Was that the desired effect? Great! For us, this was fine as the images were clear enough.

 

Too Long is Boring

Initially the videos we placed on the website were longer. We noticed that users were excited at the beginning but bored at the end. So, keep videos short.

 

Embedded Third Party Videos

Video players like the YouTube one are very popular and using them might improve usability, most users know how to use them. For us it was not an option, we wanted to have videos without ads, without external links and without any external branding.