In China QR codes are ubiquitous, partly due to the highly popular WeChat service, which had million users in April In our diary study conducted in China with WeChat users , many participants mentioned this feature and assigned a central role to it in their mental model of WeChat.
Scan and Shake: A Lesson in Technology Adoption from China’s WeChat
Our study participants also reported using the shake gesture in WeChat to interact with various TV shows and businesses, or to get more information about a song. Why are these interactions widespread in China, yet they never caught on in the US? And what is the benefit that they provide to UX? How do you make an interaction technique adopted by a wide variety of people? Three conditions need to be satisfied:.
Scan QR Code using WeChat on iPhone
QR codes and the shake gesture have met all these three criteria in China, but not in the US. Thus, QR codes fall the ease-of-use test in the US: But that is not enough — WeChat has many other features that are hardly discoverable and rarely used by its customers. QR-code scanning was, however, quickly adopted in WeChat because, early on, it was associated with two popular features, both still widely used today:. While users adopted the QR codes in WeChat because they shortened complicated processes, the adoption of the shake gesture took a different path.
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The shake gesture was available early on in WeChat for connecting with others who were shaking the phone at the same time, and a later plugin supported photo transfer from desktop to phone; however, these uses were not that common. This campaign made the shake gesture well known to a large number of users, and afterwards Tencent could take advantage of its familiarity in other contexts and for other functionalities.
Last but not least, WeChat already enjoyed a wide audience when the QR-code scanning and the shake gesture became popular — many millions of users had already installed its app. In contrast, none of the big mobile players in the US have made any of their central functionality reliant on QR-code reading or on shaking; in fact neither iOS nor Android support QR code scanning in the proprietary apps such as Camera that get shipped with the phone. Shake is used in applications such as Mail for iOS to implement undo or Google Maps to send feedback, but many users never discover it, since it is not part of the core functionality of these apps.
The other route for increasing motivation — that of offering some direct compensation the equivalent of red envelopes in China to those users who perform the gesture — is perhaps less culturally realistic or appealing for American users.
QR codes act as a convenient offline index into the online world: Not only can QR codes provide quick access to websites and a replacement for URL typing, but they can also add information to physical objects. Many physical objects bear QR codes, and people can easily scan them to augment their interaction with these objects. So I just scanned the QR code to read the instructions and awkwardly also saw the price.
There are countless examples of physical objects enriched by a QR code — they range from eggs in the refrigerator, to classified ads on a physical bulletin board, to postcards that embed pictures and audio on a piece of paper by simply affixing a QR code to it. Not only do QR codes serve as an index into the online world, but they can also act as validations for processes that happened only virtually.
For instance, a QR code can be a proof of purchase for a ticket that was bought online and never printed. The Western world is most familiar with this use of passcodes: The shake gesture also allows people to link the physical world to the online one and augment it, but usually the context — the timing or the location — of the interaction determines how the gesture is interpreted by WeChat.
For example, people can shake their phones in the proximity of a store and WeChat will give them coupons or discounts about that store, or will provide information that is relevant to customers e. Participants in an event or watchers of a TV program may shake phones to vote in a poll, to express an opinion, or even to get a turn to ask a question. Shaking the phone while a song is being played will help the listener identify the song.
People collocated or not could shake their phones simultaneously to exchange contact information and befriend each other on WeChat — this method makes it easy for complete strangers to connect if they wish to meet new people. Payments are a major source of revenue for WeChat and are based on QR codes. Both WeChat Pay and AliPay, the two major online payment services in China, support the generation of a QR code for getting paid or sending money to a random person or business.
Small business with no credit card support can still enable cash-free transactions through QR codes. Many of our diary participants commented on the convenience of using QR codes for payment:. I can also get my expense recorded in real time so that I can track my money.
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Although to a lesser extent, QR codes are also used for online payment on the desktop or on other sites similarly to checking out with PayPal in the US: Once users scan the QR code, their money is sent by WeChat to the site, and the payment is completed. QR codes are also used to authenticate WeChat users on a different device. The assumption is that users will be always logged in to WeChat on their smartphone.
When they want to log in to WeChat on a different device e. WeChat severs would then detect which mobile account was used to scan the QR code, and log in the user to that account. So standard have QR codes become that some webpages use them instead of links, especially when they point to WeChat official accounts which are mini webpages that live inside WeChat. This use has probably emerged because, until iOS 9 , it was fairly difficult to provide a deep link to a page inside an app. An added advantage is that QR codes support crossdevice handoff better than links — for example, if code is presented on a tablet or desktop screen, it can be scanned on a phone and the interaction can be continued on that device.
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However, even some pages inside WeChat use QR codes instead of links, which seems to make little sense unless you assume that the user will want to open those links on a different phone — perhaps that of a friend. In spite of QR codes being widely used, the WeChat implementation is still not perfect. For example, in our study, participants experienced difficulty extracting a QR code sent through chat. In order to do so, they had to tap the picture and view it on a separate page, then long press it.
But many participants attempted the long press in the conversation-thread view and were disappointed when they could not extract the QR code there. Pages also get Messenger Greetings, short text messages that appear in a new message thread before any messages are sent.
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Greetings can be set and edited in a Page's Message Settings. In a Facebook post Thursday, Marcus also shared that Messenger now has more than million active users — not entirely surprising given that Facebook forces mobile users to chat through the Messenger app, but still a formidable number. There are also more than 1 billion messages sent every month between people on Messenger and Business and Pages, wrote Marcus. We're using cookies to improve your experience. Click Here to find out more. Entertainment Like Follow Follow. Becoming friends with someone on Facebook Messenger just became a lot easier.