A tiny improvement to your QR Codes
Regardless of your executive’s enthusiasm, QR codes are not a silver bullet. But they are occasionally useful and I learned that you can improve them with a small tweak: leverage the right mode.
Suppose you encode a URL, e.g. https://www.wassupy.com/:
And then this similar URL, HTTPS://WWW.WASSUPY.COM/:
The all-caps version is simpler because it makes use of the “alphanumeric” segment mode to attain higher information density:
| Input mode | Bits/char. | Character set |
|---|---|---|
| Numeric | 3 ⅓ | [0-9] |
| Alphanumeric | 5 ½ | [0–9A–Z$%*+./: -] |
| Binary/byte | 8 |
Note: the alphanumeric set does not include lowercase letters.
When building the QR code, your input is split into segments according to what mode can handle the input, and all-caps URLs fit into the more efficient alphanumeric mode. Keeping this in mind, you can generally always make the scheme and host portion of a URL uppercase, and the more caps you can accommodate in the path, the better.
Of course, using shorter URLs helps the most 😊.