Monthly Archives: July 2010

28Jul / 2010

McDonalds QR-code Shows Nutrition Information

McDonalds Japan uses a lot of QR-code technology as marketing tool. In a purchase of drink and snack, I could find 4 codes on the placemat and the potato bacon pie package.

I particularly like the code on the pie package, which leads you to McDonald’s nutrition site. The interaction flow is like this:

  • A customer purchases a pie and happily sits down to enjoy it.
  • Being a health conscious individual, the customer is quite concerned about how much nutrition and calories the pie has.
  • The customer pulls out his/her mobile phone, snaps the code and immediately sees the nutrition information about the pie in great detail. After knowing that the calories in this pie doesn’t exceed the daily limit, he/she feels save and happy to enjoy it without hesitation. Yum!

My thoughts:

Nutrition Campaign — McDonald’s can run a campaign to promote health conscious living, by creating free mobile app that let you scan food and automatically calculate the daily total calories consumption. The app is just a very simple QR-code scanner, which would recognize the code of the food you are eating (and also allow manual editing), and then automatically pull from the database the calories and nutrition values such as sodium, iron, fat and so on, and present a table of individual items as well as the daily total. It can also remember the data of previous days to generate historical charts.

Since most people perceive McDonalds as an unhealthy fast food restaurant, I think it would be nice for them to run such campaign to improve their public image and help marketing.

Testing Japanese Mobile Websites — tips to test mobile sites for Japanese mobile phone from desktop browser:

  • Change your browser’s user agent to one of the listed agent on Docomo‘s spec page:
    http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/spec/useragent/
  • For this test, I just randomly picked this user agent with support of Browser 2.0:
    "DoCoMo/2.0 F04B(c500;TB;W30H25) (Communicating from the browser(vertical full screen))"
  • Turn on Safari “Develop” option to enable custom user agent.
  • Change the Text-encoding to “Japanese (Shift JIS)” if your browser is not already defaulted to Japanese encoding.

More photos:

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Posted in Experience, Packaging Design

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27Jul / 2010

Season Colour – I Think Spring is Green

If I pick a colour to represent Spring, the colour would be Light Green because it reminds me of sprouting grass and trees [1]. But interestingly when asking some Japanese friends for a colour of Spring, they all choose Pink because it is the colour of the cherry blossom (桜咲き) [2].

This is a good example of how people from different countries would perceive different meanings on abstract concepts, such as the association between colour and season. However, when I tried to find related data and research on the Internet, there are not too much of them except from the fashion industry. Furthermore, the data is usually:

  • Single sourced — a single fashion designer or company “forecasting” the trend of new colour for next Spring. It is not a general choice of many many people.
  • Context dependent — in this case only for fashion, but not for general purpose.
  • Country/culture specific — usually a preference from western world, but not many other countries.

I want to do a tiny research to find the answer of this question: What Colour Would You Choose to Associate with the Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. I want to gather the data from people all over the world and discover such patterns. My Hypothesis is that, despite of personal preference, people from different countries should have different general patterns related to their geographical location, weather, culture, custom, history, and so on. I hope that at the end of the research I will be able to publish the data, and allow designers of all sorts to use more suitable colour for specific target audiences.

Stay tuned to future posts with the tag “season colour“.

[2] photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/xerones/141357725/

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Posted in Culture, Design, Visual Design

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24Jul / 2010

Banana Vending Machine

I found the first banana vending machine in Japan at Shibuya. Operating by Dole, it offers a bunch of banana for ¥390, or one piece for ¥130. It seems that this machine is just the very first version, where the mechanical design is still not perfect and easy to get stuck. Or perhaps that is a feature to make banana split? I will check this machine out again later and try to record a video of it in operation.

It will be pretty awesome to see this thing in major train stations. City people are rarely having enough fruit for a healthy and balance diet, so in my opinion the Japanese government should sponsor to set up more such fruit vending machines, as well as subsidize the cost and make it more affordable. It is preventive health care: if the citizens eat more healthily, the national health care cost should be reduced, right? Just a thought.

If you are also interested in checking out this machine, you can find it in B2F 一勧銀共同ビル, Shibuya.

Address:
〒150-0042
東京都渋谷区宇田川町２３−３ 渋谷第一勧銀共同ビル

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23Jul / 2010

Mobile Payment

It is obvious that the mobile payment system will be big and ubiquitous in the future. However, the current trend of convenient electronic payment is still focusing on proprietary RFID/near-field chips, so it is really difficult to truly get 100% penetration unless one giant company rules them all, makes hugh investment and implements such system in national/international basis. Example of such payment system includes OCTOPUS, SUICA, WAON [1][2], VISA chip card technology, just to name a few.

However, my vision of true mobile payment system is based on mobile phone. Here is one example in picture [3]:

  1. You order a drink at cashier
  2. The staff will enter your order
  3. An order identifier (in form of QR Code) will show on the screen. You use your mobile phone to scan the code
  4. Confirm the payment
  5. Transaction complete. You can now take your drink and enjoy!

Of course I made a lot of assumptions here.

  • For instance, I assume that mobile Internet will be extremely reliable and always available.
  • Also, the phone must have such payment system built-in or be able to run an App to do so.
  • Internet security must be good so financial institute would trust such system to work, and honor the money transaction.

However, these assumptions are not too far fetch. Technology grows exponentially. Just imagine 5 years ago what our mobile phone could do, and what it can do right now. I feel comfortable to bet that mobile internet in the (near) future will become much faster, cheaper and reliable, thus such mobile payment system will be doable.

This mobile payment idea was originally inspired by Mobio, and here is the post about it earlier this year. I will continue to refine my idea and post updates on my blog.

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21Jul / 2010

Phone Book

I was pretty excited when I saw the Phone Book for sale in a bookstore at Shibuya.

I have previously blogged about the Phone Book, which is a children book that uses a iPhone or iPod Touch to provide attractive interactions. The package has a hard paper “shell” in the form of a book, as well as a slot to slide in the touch screen device. Please read on to my previous blog post about the product and my comments.

Phone Book is selling at ¥2980, or approximately $34.50 USD. It is designed and manufactured by Mobile Art Lab.

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About Calvin

Hello there, I’m Calvin Chun-yu Chan. Grew up in Hong Kong, studied and worked in Canada as web engineer+designer, now designing mobile apps in Tokyo. On my blog I would like to share my opinions on design, usability, culture and creativity.

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Twitter @calvincchan