Where’s My Code? Making Sense of QR Codes For Merchants, SMBs and Retailers
Working with a cutting-edge ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) company, we dove into the world of QR codes. We explored how small to medium businesses make sense of a technology that now seems everywhere, but may still confuse the people needing to deploy it.
Feedback
“We engaged with Christopher and Anna after a recommendation from an industry colleague. Christopher and Anna provided exceptional value by applying a human-centred design lens to our conversion challenges, quickly identifying the critical friction points in our user journey. Their data-driven approach gave us a clear, actionable roadmap to transform and drive meaningful growth for our platform.”
Success
We guided our client in developing a human-centred design perspective that could be immediately applied to make effective feature choices and create engaging experiences.
We provided design improvements to their online sign-up process. Their previous design had been a key barrier to being able to increase in-market uptake and adoption.
Based on our client’s business case and customer research, we created a set of key customer personas to help focus the business and to shape future product-feature choice-making, pricing and market placements.
Challenge
QR codes, invented in 1994 by the Denso Wave corporation of Japan, were originally intended to label auto-parts within a production process. Offered royalty-free to the technology and business community, QR codes have since spread widely.
QR codes overlap and interact with a range of other product, service and resource identification programs, including product barcodes and serials. However, they are unique because end users can scan a QR code with mobile devices, including phones and tablets. The codes both store information within the structure, as well as redirect users to on-computer or online resources via link encoding. They also support error correction for damaged or partial codes.
Because of this wide capability, since the Covid-19 pandemic, QR codes have become near-synonymous as a quick method to access web-based hyperlinks, or other online information, via a smartphone camera. In 2022, QR code industry players suggest that 60 to 70% of Australians had scanned a code in the previous month.
These use cases include scanning codes to: load a restaurant menu, check into an institution or service, lead to an online form, see additional information or videos online about an in-store product, enter a payment gateway, or more.
Our client, an innovative Australian-based ‘Software as a Service’ (SaS) company, with software that had generated millions of QR codes across a core set of users, wanted to understand how to grow their QR code service to a new cohort clients.
Web analytics showed there was a decline in traffic right before sign-up. This suggested that something in the information presented, pricing, sign-up flow or wider sign-up experience wasn’t pulling people in to try a free version of the service. Given the company was depending on a ’free + premium’ service model, this was a real challenge, as it undercut the number of people using the tools and had a knock-on effect on the paid-plan conversion.
Based on a collaborative exploration of the brief, and an initial high-level analysis, we agreed to focus on finding challenges within the sign-up process and offer solutions for a better experience. This left room for further sprints of experience design to explore: discovery, onboarding, use, free to paid transition, back-of-house efficiencies, support, referrals and sunset.
Approach & Deliverables
A price and time sensitive experience review
Given tight time and budget constraints, we carried out a Tactical Experience Audit; the smallest, most self-contained, meaningful analysis that we carry out on existing experiences. The dual backbone of our Tactical Experience Audit were the inward-out and outward-in reviews of the existing system.
The inward-out exploration involved a step-by-step expert review of the sign-up journey, across the two channels end-users could use to join the service. The review was conducted using a set of product-relevant in-house design criteria curated from best-in-practice industry standards, and our past experience conducting hundreds of audits.
The outward-in exploration involved gathering fresh feedback in order to challenge internal company assumptions about users. We focused on three sources of insight that could help paint a tactical picture of QR code needs, challenges and inspirations, including: direct feedback from customers relayed via operational support teams, ‘guerrilla’ in-field interviews with potential customers (SMBs), and product reviews of comparable in-market software.
The last source of feedback, strong positive and negative reviews of similar QR code software sourced from product review sites, has to be interpreted with caution. Competitor software isn’t necessarily directly comparable, yet, candid product reviews can provide a useful insight what matters to people, e.g. features and functions. As well as helping a company understand what people struggle with most, and what their experience dealbreakers are.
Putting it all together
To communicate the improvements we provided three visual deliverables, including:
End-to-end sign-up journey
All research was synthesised into an end-to-end customer experience sign-up journey. We built a common linear backbone into the journeys (for clarity), but included loops, errors and diversions (for fidelity).
Visual journey maps help business decision-makers understand and contextualise a customer’s experience, leading to better decisions about what changes to make, and why.
The journey included snippets from website analytics, customer feedback, ad-hoc interviews and audit insight. This enabled us to be able to see as much of the real experience as possible.
Customer personas
Personas are representations of a user group in the form of a single, composite person. We construct these with care, basing them on real data. They are a lens through which we interpret the experience as a whole and use them as indicators, not mandates. We provided our client with several personas, focused on their most impactful and valuable customer types.
Clear design opportunities
To round out the project, we identified out five evidence-based design opportunities that occurred at key points in the sign-up experience. Each opportunity had a clear line of sight to user and business metrics. And each opportunity led to concrete design choices. This ensured, once implemented, the impact of each design improvement could be measured, leading directly to further investigations. This is design based on evidence and measurement, not guesswork.
Insights & Outcomes
One of the overarching insights for this project was that potential customers struggled with some of the technical complexity around setting up QR codes. And this was making it difficult for our client to prove the value of their offering to a wider body of customers.
Perceived complexity among users made friction-free sign-up crucial. As well as offering well-constructed onboarding to help people understand more advanced features. Usability-oriented improvements worked in conjunction with the branding, tone of voice and other emotional aspects of marketing service.
Beyond interface-specific changes was the realisation that the business needed to focus on a specific customer segment. The needs and constraints of one in-focus user group would be key in shaping any business choices about what to build and why.
We presented the sign-up experience feedback to the leadership team, including the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Lead Developer. Our insights helped their team take a new perspective on sign-up.
Our work guiding the client through the Human Centred Design process also meant that we were able to surface wider questions about product positioning, feature choices and better future approaches to shaping the production vision.
