One-and two-dimensional barcodes, including Quick Response (QR) codes, have become a convenient way to communicate small amounts of information from physical objects to mobile devices. While there is much discussion, awareness, and proposed use of such barcodes, both in academia and in industry, to our knowledge there has not been a systematic and in-depth analysis of the actual ecosystem surrounding these codes. To fill this gap, we analyze a log of all scans performed by users of a popular QR and barcode scanning app available for Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone. Our dataset includes over 87 million scans performed over a 10-month period from May 2013 to March 2014. We examine general use patterns of QR and barcodes in the wild and identify common and uncommon uses and misuses. We see the presence of both conventional (e.g., web) and emerging (e.g., Bitcoin) uses of QR codes, and develop an informed understanding of the types of QR codes being created and how users interact with QR and barcodes in the wild.
Weak passwords are one of the most pervasive threats in cybersecurity. Facing this threat, users require guidance on how to protect themselves. A method frequently used by IS practitioners and researchers to provide this guidance is fear appeals, persuasive messages intended to prompt behavioral changes in response to a threat. However, previous research has not considered a key element of fear appeal effectiveness: task primacy. When fear appeals are a part of the primary or focal task, users’ cognitive engagement will be high by default. However, when fear appeals are delivered as secondary tasks, such as interruptive security messages, users’ engagement is likely to be low because the primary task takes priority in attentional and cognitive resources. In such cases, a remedy is needed to elicit engagement with the fear appeal. In this research note, we theorize that cognitive engagement acts as a contextual moderator that is critical to the effectiveness of fear appeals under the boundary condition of task primacy. Further, we theorize that interactivity, a mechanism that adapts message content through tailored real-time feedback in response to a user’s actions, is a key remedy to enhance engagement with fear appeals. However, to date fear appeals have largely been tested in noninteractive primary tasks, and no study has provided a theoretical explanation for why interactivity enhances the power of a fear appeal. We empirically examined engagement as a contextual moderator in two ways. First, we conducted a field experiment, which manipulated messages on a password creation form on a real-world website. Second, we performed a qualitative focus group study to triangulate the experimental results and more fully reify our theoretical model. Together, the findings reveal that interactivity acts as a catalyst to engage participants with a fear appeal, which then allows the persuasive message of the fear appeal to be internalized. The concepts of boundary condition of task primacy and engagement suggest ways that fear appeals can be more effectively applied in research and practice.
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