MatrixScan Find Wins IF Design Award

We’re proud to announce that MatrixScan Find has won a prestigious IF Design Award in the user experience (UX) category.

The independent iF Design Award is recognized as a symbol of outstanding design worldwide. MatrixScan Find was chosen from nearly 11,000 entries from 56 countries.

Why did it win? Well, have you ever struggled to find a product from many similar-looking items such as a rack of spices? That’s the problem MatrixScan Find addresses using mobile augmented reality (AR).

It’s a software solution that helps users instantly locate items with AR using almost any smart device. MatrixScan Find scans all items in the camera view and highlights the matching one instantly.

It works for any product where you can scan a barcode, and can be integrated into any application.

Why did we develop MatrixScan Find?

We started with the idea that frontline workers in retail, logistics companies, and fulfillment centers often struggle to find the items they need to pick or pack. It’s especially difficult with similar-looking items like cosmetics, shoe boxes, DIY items, clothes, medicines, and generic brown boxes.

As well as making employees’ lives harder than they need to be, this leads to errors in fulfilling online orders, inefficient processes and sub-par customer support for in-store shoppers.

We thought that this problem could be easily tackled with computer vision and smart data capture. MatrixScan Find’s visually-driven assisted search experience reduces search time and improves accuracy by making human errors nearly impossible.

One of its strengths is its versatility. With a single UX framework, the AR experience works with both B2B and B2C applications. Both frontline workers and consumers can use it with ease. It can also be implemented in both smartphones and tablets.

A dual-track design process

MatrixScan Find is primarily an API (Application Programming Interface) that developers integrate into their own applications, although its functionality is also integrated into our Scandit Express app. Scandit Express is designed for use when you don’t have an application of your own or need a solution that doesn’t require software integration work.

This meant that we had to consider two aspects during the design process:

1. Is it easy and intuitive for first-time users to understand how to use?
2. Is it easy for developers to integrate into their applications?

To effectively tackle both requirements, we came up with a pre-built (or out-of-the-box) user interface (UI) that can be integrated into any application with just a few lines of code.

By creating a pre-built UI, we could effectively validate and control the level of overall usability. From a developer’s point of view, they can save a lot of time by not having to design the UX or implementing UI elements from scratch.

During the design process, we not only tested our out-of-the-box UI with target users to iterate its usability, but tested the API documentation with enterprise developers to get ideas about the features. This is what made it a dual-track process.

A commitment to excellence in scanning UX design

The IF design award for MatrixScan Find underscores our commitment to excellence in scanning UX design.

Barcode and ID scanning is everywhere, and scanning is the key entry point into many frontline workflows. Think of a retail associate scanning barcodes to confirm receipt of products, airline staff scanning passports at a departure gate, or a delivery driver scanning a parcel at your door.

We believe raising the user experience bar for scanning technology not only improves the everyday life of millions of frontline workers but represents a large untapped source of value for enterprises.

MatrixScan Find is part of a wider suite of smart data capture products that share the same high design standards. This includes MatrixScan Count (for inventory counting), SparkScan (for scanning barcodes fast and efficiently at scale), Scandit Express (our no-code standalone app) and ID Verify (for detecting fake IDs).

We’re delighted that our approach to scanning UX has been validated by this major design award – and we’re looking forward to many more to come as we continue our work to shift tedious tasks from people to technology and upskill frontline workers with useful real-time insights.