Tag Archives: qrcode

16Sep / 2010

Subway Line Logos To Make A QR-code

A giant QR-code printed on a poster that says:

東京メトロでの「困った！」は、
こちらのフリーダイヤルへ。

Confused by the Tokyo Metro? Use this code for “free dial”.

Upon scanning the code into my phone, the screen reveals that it is indeed a phone number that you can call customer service to ask for help.

I think sometimes the best way to help a confused passenger is to provide an interactive hotline with real human on the other side, rather than sending them to yet another confusing Help webpage or a FAQ.

An additional nice point for visual design, where the QR-code is composed by many little Metro Line Logos. Nice custom designed QR-code.

Posted in Design, Visual Design

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22Aug / 2010

QR-code Coupon in Restaurant Guide

Want more info and get coupons for the restaurants in this building? Simply snap the QR-code (or manually enter the website address) and you’ll be brought to a webpage when all that. Use your cel-phone as a coupon book!

Posted in Experience

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04Aug / 2010

Local Map in Train Station with Mobile Phone “Touch Download”

I am seeing a lot of local map in train stations that has a “touch download” feature, which allows mobile phone users to download local business information simply by taping their FeliCa-powered mobile phone to the sensor.

FeliCa is a RFID technology offered by Sony that allows touchless money and data transaction. The technology is currently being widely used by Japanese public transit and electronic payment systems.

Unlike QR-code, this touchless RFID is supposed to be much quicker in response time. Theoretically the user can conveniently and instantly get the information on their phone without touching any button on the keypad.

On the other hand, using of this technology is only limited to Sony’s business partner and those who can afford to install a FeliCa transceiver. Also, such transceiver would consume electricity, so it might not work when there is a power outage. In that case, QR-code is still a better offline (zero electricity required) alternative. Also, since QR-code is a loyalty free technology, you can freely incorporate the code into posters and marketing materials.

Unfortunately I don’t own a FeliCa compatible mobile phone so I couldn’t record a video clip of it in use.

Wikipedia on Sony FeliCa technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa

Posted in Experience, Usability

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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:

Posted in Experience, Packaging Design

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16Jul / 2010

QR-code Use by Real Estate Agency

QR Code is printed on a real estate agency board to encourage mobile phone user to search for more houses using their web service. The mobile site has a simple HTML search interface, which is designed mainly for Japanese mobile phone.

With more mobile phones planning to support HTML5 and geolocation API, what can such real estate application do to take advantage of the technology and provide a better user/house buyer experience?

In addition, with the popular of iPhone and iPad, some apps are developed to help both house buyers and agents to reach a deal. Google search: “real estate ipad app”.

Related: I previously blogged about QR Code, or known as FlashCode, being popularized in Paris. Also another post about using QR Code as an identification system for mobile payment service.

Posted in Usability

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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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