What the Heck a QR Code Is — and How to Use It Right

By March 2011, QR codes had been technically available for fifteen years (Denso Wave introduced them in 1994 for Japanese automotive-supply-chain use) but were having their first U.S. moment as a consumer-facing technology. The combination of iPhone and Android camera quality, smartphone-mobile-data adoption hitting roughly 30% of U.S. mobile users, and free QR-reading apps like RedLaser and ScanLife had made the technology suddenly usable at the consumer end. Smartphone-as-barcode-scanner was, briefly, novel.

The 2011 wave of QR-code adoption produced an enormous quantity of poorly-designed implementations — codes printed in subway stations where there was no mobile data signal, codes at billboards a quarter-mile from the road they advertised, codes that resolved to non-mobile-optimised pages, codes on television (where you couldn't scan a moving image). The 'use it right' framing in the article would have addressed the design rules: link to a mobile-friendly page, include a fallback URL in the surrounding print, place codes where scanning is physically possible, and provide a meaningful action on the destination page.

The category trajectory afterwards is instructive. QR codes' first U.S. moment ended around 2014 — they had become a punchline by then, with enough tech-press writing about poorly-deployed codes that the form became culturally dismissed. The pandemic-era 2020 revival, driven by contactless-menu use cases and supported by the iOS native camera-app QR scanning that Apple shipped in iOS 11, has now made QR codes mainstream consumer infrastructure in a way the 2011 wave never quite achieved. The 2011 piece sits at the start of the first wave.