How to fail at using mobile barcodes

There’s a post over at 2d code today about a new film coming from Dreamworks and Touchstone pictures, called I Am Number Four. It looks a like a fairly forgettable teen thriller about kids with supernatural powers – but the trailer contains a QR Code. Normally I’d be shouting “huzzah!” Except that in this case it’s so horribly deployed, it might as well not be there.

What’s the deal here?

Assumptions are dangerous things. If you’re reading this article, I can assume you already know what a QR Code is. But just in case you don’t, it’s one of these:

GoMo's URL

That little black and white grid is a 2d barcode, and it is fantastically useful. When you’ve got a barcode reader installed on your cameraphone, it can scan and decode the barcode. Once it’s decoded, whatever content was stored there is now available to your phone. Most commonly it’s a URL for a website – snapping a mobile barcode is far, far faster than typing an entire web address into your phone.

To give you a flavour for the kinds of thing that mobile barcodes can be used for, here’s a recent sampling:

Jack Daniel’s – linking advertising to a national campaign to have Jack Daniel’s birthday made a national holiday

JCPenneys – placing barcodes beside mattresses in-store, to give consumers more information about possible purchases

QR4Wine – placing a link on a bottle of wine that gives you access to it’s tasting notes

Mobio – allowing consumers to order food directly to their seats in a football stadium

Michael C Fina – giving window shoppers pricing information about jewelery displayed in a shop window

So, there’s a lot you can use barcodes for.

What’s the problem with I Am Number Four?

The trailer for this movie has a QR Code right at the end. Just look at it!

Let me count the ways it fails.

1) No education

What is that thing? If you’ve never seen a QR Code before, you will have no idea what it is, what it’s for, or why you should care. Now take a look at the Michael C. Fina example from above:

That’s more like it. There’s an explanation of what you’re looking at, what you’ll get for scanning it, and how to go about getting a scanner.

2) No explanation

Let’s say you already know what a QR Code is. Now, why should you scan the above code? What do you get from it? You have literally no idea. Mobile barcodes like this are like clickable links on the internet – how likely are you to click a link on-line if you have no idea where it will bring you?

Quite apart from which, scanning barcodes does require you take out your phone and boot up your scanner. Then you scan the code, and probably sit waiting for quite some time while your phone loads up the webpage (how fast is your 3G connection?). That may not sound like a big deal, but it is honestly enough of an inconvenience to stop most people from scanning a barcode – especially if they don’t know what they’ll get for their effort.

3) Wrong place, wrong time

If you check the deployments above, you’ll notice they all share something in common. They are all printed on real-world items. They perform the amazing trick of connecting a solid, actual item to the digital world. Your bottle of wine has become a clickable link – something that was not achievable before.

The same thing cannot be said of a YouTube video. The QR Code flashes on the screen for two seconds, and is gone. In order to scan it, you need to pause the video… then get your phone out, boot up your scanner, etc. Why not just put a link below the video? Why not put in the actual URL?

To sum up:

Every single thing that makes a mobile barcode convenient is completely lacking here. This code is floating on its own, in the wrong place, with no explanation and no good reason to click it. It might as well not be there.

Why am I so wound up about this? Because it’s not the first time it has happened this week: if you read our mobile barcode round-up from Monday, you’ll see equally poorly implemented mobile barcodes from Ride Snowboards and the Washington Redskins. And every time some ham-fisted failure of a barcode like that is launched, it holds the barcoding industry back a little more.

(Those last two examples were sourced from 2d Barcode Strategy and 2d Code UK, respectively)