Thoughts @

barenaked mCode promos?

Barenaked Ladies Poster - from Pondering Primate

Happy fingers, smarter phones, easier life. This is the promise of ConnexTo, the creators of mCode, a 2D visual code that can be customized to ‘pass information from print to the digital world.’ The concept is to easily create the graphic containing customized information – or what they call ‘digital graffiti’ – and share it with others quickly and easily.

I’ve talked about the influx of mobile codes in America earlier this year, and have been waiting for some real-world usage to see what is going to stick – and to determine if our U.S. market is going to embrace this method as a means of gathering data and interacting with media in a new way. I’m waiting for one of the major carriers to create a standard for 2D codes, and to help a lagging market prep and ready themselves for an influx of new marketing and advertising methods.

A few days ago, a comment from ‘Todd’ pointed me to a post from the Pondering Primate a few days ago, highlighting the mCode usage on this concert poster created by iLoop Mobile as part of an interactive mobile marketing campaign used to connect the band to its fan base.

I was excited about mCode – so I decided to try it.

FIRST - I went to the ConnextTo site and tried to determine if my phone was supported. After much scrolling (and more scrolling) and also seeing the note to the left stating Symbian would be supported ‘soon,’ I was surprised to find a beta for the SE910. Maybe it will work. I’m a bit skeptical of the beta. I click on the image of the phone. Nothing. I click again. Nothing. I guess this just tells me the phone is supported. I was expecting to be able to click on it and be taken to another page to download the software. Or at least a page that tells me how to download the software on my phone.

SECOND - I read through the FAQ and one of the main links states how it is FREE and easy to use. Under that statement is some information I would have liked to have known – Q: How can I get the ConnexTo Code Reader onto my phone?
A: Using your WAP browser on your phone go to wap.connexto.com. There you can download the application to supported phones. It says it supports a BETA version for the SE P910a. Skeptical as that makes me, I try it:

RESULT (see image) I get an error.

Connexto error screen

Much like my trial ShoZu efforts (which, by the way started to work last week after this update, although I still haven’t gotten it to work 100%) – some issue with my mobile internet connection was not allowing me to properly download and install the application. This is the MAIN ISSUE with downloading new software and trying out some cool new mobile apps that are not integrated into the device’s main system upon purchase. There are always ISSUES with the installation. The mental model for downloading and trying new mobile apps from the developer’s perspective goes something like this:

1) See if your phone is supported. If yes, move to step 2.
2) Find phone model and carrier, and enter your mobile number.
3) Receive SMS and click on ‘download’
4) Follow step by step instructions (hopefully fewer than 3 screens) to the mobile internet and download new application.
5) Restart your device and “voila” all is working and this new icon or app is running seamlessly on your desktop.

The actual user experience goes something like this:

1) Read through web site to see what the app does, or hear about it from a friend and decide to try it out.
2) Determine if your phone model is supported. Most need to see a photo – and many do not even know which model they have.
3) Select the phone that looks like the one you have. When prompted, you might know the model number, but generally you select the closest looking one, or the last model number you remember, thinking ‘that should be close enough, right?’
4) Choose your carrier and enter your phone number. Mostly straightforward (except when updating device – see #9 below)Later you realize it DOES matter. In fact, the nightmarish truth is that every last detail matters and from a user experience perspective, this attempt at ‘seamless’ downloading is turning into a step-by-step-by-step mind game.
5) Enter your mobile number (wondering if it will be used for marketing at a different time) and await for the friendly “buzz” saying your SMS has arrived.
6) Open the SMS and click on “download” (or enter the URL specified on the web site, which hopefully will ‘sniff’ out your device and direct you properly.
7) An error message pops up – something reading like the snapshot above, “error -77, browser not supported” or something like that.
8) Give up at that point – or – launch into another path towards figuring out that your mobile device has not been updated in some time so you go to the home page of your manufacturer and see if there are any updates.
9) Go to your device home page and find the updates page. You need to select your device and carrier. Two might be presented – “Cingular” and “Cingular – Former AT&T Customer”. “Cingular” comes up first and it MUST be similar to the former AT&T Customer, so you select it. Unfortunately realizing that it DOES make a difference and you have to start again with the update.
10) Realize your mobile email is down (for some reason thinking it must relate to the error) and you have to look up your user name and password which you do not remember because this is not your primary mail. You call your IT support, who did not set up your device. You find out there is an administrative view of the mobile email so you have to find that first and then reset all of your passwords and retrace your set up on your device to see if that helps.
11) For some reason you can now get mobile email but your mobile internet is still not working.
12) You give up. Opting to try again at some other point in time because ALL YOU WANTED TO DO WAS TRY THE DARNED mCODE in the first place!

How many mobile apps have failed because some error that is not part of the ‘perceived’ user experience interferes and cannot be immediately resolved? A break in the flow stopping the main task, which was to TRY something new has caused a potential customer to drop the experience entirely. In most user experience tests we have conducted, demos to test the installation process are ‘best case’ scenarios and often yield inaccurate results. Most real-world situations need to factor in phone calls or other interruptions, passwords that have been expired or need to be looked up, operator/carrier updates not installed (especially with smartphones) and also a simple ‘error’ message on the device that is not easily fixed.

This posting started with a review of the latest QR-code competitors. Even the post was derailed due to the ‘real-world’ truth of mobile downloading hell. But back to what I was originally writing about.

Last week, Fujitsu announced (this link goes to a site all in Japanese, which unfortunately I cannot read… but the picture is reposted here for easy interpretation) the FP Code or “fine picture” code which allows data to be layered/merged into a photograph that is unreadable to the human eye.

fujitsu FP code image (from Fujitsu.com)

In a post on FP codes, Jan Kuczynski states:

Fujitsu are naturally tight-lipped about how they do this – all they reveal is that the system was inspired by the fact that the sensitivity of human vision alters according to size and colour. Sounds complicated. The big draw of the system is, like blacklight QR codes, the codes don’t compromise the design of printed material. In the future will all printed pictures contain embedded codes?

Scott Saffer of the Pondering Primate calls this “a new physical world hyperlink,” which brings me full circle back to the Barenaked mCode promos. The question – do we care to link? Is everything we see, touch or feel in the future going to be encoded with accessible data? What ‘physical hyperlinking’ technique is going to stick in the rest of the world (focus on the U.S. market) and will anything be as ubiquitous as the QR code in Japan, or will we be faced with multiple formats restricted by our device and carrier preferences over one single source of embedded data?

Posted on September 24th, 2006 in Thoughts
Tagged as , , , ,
Written by Kelly Goto

2 Responses to “barenaked mCode promos?”

Comments

  1. kosmar says:
    September 24th, 2006

    wow, i just had to laugh about your rant. actually i was reading it on my mobile which made it sound funny to me.
    but you are so right about installation madness.
    for the fp-codes: i really dont get the point in “invisible” codes. how will you know about them, then? seems a dead end to me, in fact.
    for the mcode: why do we need twelve systems? i mean a bit of competition is nice, but we need a standard for stuff like that. semacode never worked on my phone btw. but shotcode.com worked really well, also the installation was nice :)

  2. Kelly Goto says:
    September 24th, 2006

    kosmar, sorry for the rant. it just drives me crazy how often I try things out and some little thing goes wrong with my device - the more complicated it gets and more computer-like, the more we need ongoing IT assistance and it creates a less-friendly environment for the technically impared ;-) I must try the shotcode. I really want a standard…

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