QR Codes: The Utility Problem
I read 2 QR code articles today. This one is probably the most entertaining. It essentially argues that nobody knows what QR codes are (still), and that even when they do, they are too obnoxious to use to make them useful.
As a one time QR proponent (larger for my own non marketing related ideas), My feeling is not that QR Codes are fundamentally flawed, but that they have been taken over by marketers in a way that makes the fundamental value proposition of this technology pretty… *shrug.*
At one point, QR Codes were a way for designers of some sort to come up with interesting experiences. Area/code did a lot of this, as did a number of folks in Japan and Europe. QR Codes allowed designers to pretty quickly take designs out into the real world, and were an easier, cheaper, and more accessible way of doing location stuff in the pre-iPhone era. Even some early attempts at marketing with QR codes were essentially experience design. There was novelty, but also at least some sense of this being something interesting. QR codes have been used in awesome ways, mainly through the sense of mystery about what lay on the other side of this physical / virtual divide.
But then location technologies became better, and experience designers started abandoning QR Codes for GPS, etc. Foursquare is a classic example of this — instead of taking a picture of a QR Code to check in somewhere, it’s a lot easier and more fun to have the GPS scan for nearby places.
As a result, QR Codes became more of a utility, and marketers treated it as such. Scan this QR Code to download a vCard, or visit the web page of a band you see on a flyer. Now that QR Codes are a utility, their flaws as a utility become very clear. It’s way easier to look up things on your phone’s web browser, for instance, instead of going through this awkward dance of opening your QR code reader app, waiting for the (still slow) camera to load, taking the picture, processing the image, and then rendering whatever content the marketers what you to see.
That brings up the 2nd issue — lack of agency. You are taken wherever the fuck the marketer wants you. As this techcrunch piece notes out, there could be an increasing chance you’ll get taken somewhere a tad sketchy.
Clearly, none of this is the technology’s fault, but rather the result of a shift in who is designing QR experiences and who these experiences are designed for.
(To be fair, I would argue that NFC will run into a lot of the same problems)
