Usefulness: Foremost, the technique has to provide some sort of benefit.How do you make an interaction technique adopted by a wide variety of people? Three conditions need to be satisfied: Mediation Between Online and Offline Worlds.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? 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. 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. In China QR codes are ubiquitous, partly due to the highly popular WeChat service, which had 700 million users in April 2016. The QR code takes users to a page in WeChat where they can purchase the products. A QR code for the Chinese company Juewei advertising its snacks on a subway car. If I asked you to scan a QR code on your phone today, chances are that you wouldn’t be able to. However, they never caught on and they have pretty much fallen into oblivion. You never enter a password into a desktop app: Instead, you click “login” and get a notification on your phone asking you to confirm.A few years back, QR codes, 2-dimensional “quick response” barcodes traditionally made up of black squares placed on a white square grid, were touted as the next big thing: you could use them to quickly scan a URL in a magazine or on a poster and read more information about the product.

For WeChat, being mobile first means that your phone is king, and everything goes through it.įor example, if you want to use WeChat on a laptop or desktop PC, you have to use a QR code to link it to you phone and verify access from your phone. tech industry likes to talk about “mobile first” experiences, but that catchphrase doesn’t play out the same way that it does in China, which never developed the PC-centric culture that Americans experienced before smartphones took off. Living in WeChat provides a taste of the cultural differences between China and the U.S., and how rapidly technology moves on the other side of the world. At first it was tough to orient myself, but became much easier as I found out why certain things are the way they are. But when I joined a Chinese app developer a few years ago, it quickly became my most-used app. lacks many of these extra services, which helps explain why it flies under the radar.Īs an American, I didn’t plan on getting closely acquainted with WeChat. The version of the app available in the U.S. On WeChat, you can call taxis, donate to charities, play games, and send and receive money, among a host of other activities-as long as you’re in China or have a Chinese bank card. But it’s not just a sticky “chat app.” WeChat is a full-blown mobile platform and one that likely influenced Facebook’s plans for Messenger, which involve making it a hub for apps, services, and even customer-support exhanges. It’s how Chinese companies conduct business as well as how large swaths of the country’s users stay connected to each other. WWDC 2016 WeChat recently hit a billion monthly users, a figure that puts it in the rarified company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger. consumers aren’t familiar with it? It’s because the app is a dominant force in the Chinese market, where Apple is continuously trying to adapt, evolve, and grow. Why was WeChat so heavily featured by Apple if typical U.S.

Wechat desktop fake video