opinion
"If the main goal of a kiosk
project is to get someone to
interact with your kiosks’ content
or services, you must know who
that target audience is"
applications that allow customers
to order products not carried in the
physical store and have those items
shipped to their home. In a government
setting, kiosks can allow citizens to apply
for permits, renew vehicle registrations
and pay taxes or other fees. In nearly
all cases, the use of a kiosk can allow
an organisation to speed up service for
basic tasks while allowing for staff to
be redeployed to hand more complex
chores.
Banking trade publication ‘The
Financial Brand’, for example, recently
detailed how kiosks fit into a shift in
the financial services industry. Upon
arriving at a digitally optimised branch,
customers would have the option of
walking up to a tablet-based kiosk
to check-in and provide a reason for
their visit, ensuring they meet with the
appropriate person. For simple tasks,
customers can approach one of a
number of employees walking around
the lobby, who can then offer assistance
via a tablet they carry with them. The
employee can use the tablet’s built-
in camera to capture an image of the
customer’s identification and any other
relevant documents.
For more complicated tasks such as
applying for a loan or renting a safety
deposit box, the check-in process would
alert the appropriate staffer that a
customer is waiting. The staffer can then
go out and greet the customer by name,
ready with the information they need to
best serve that customer.
Although the benefits of a self-service
kiosk are many, ensuring the success of
a kiosk project requires some advance
planning. The first step requires looking
carefully at your expected user base and
determining how and why they might
engage with a kiosk.
Who is going to use the kiosks?
If the main goal of a kiosk project is
to get someone to interact with your
kiosks’ content or services, you must
know who that target audience is. Your
target audience can affect almost every
decision you have to make – from design
decisions like your interface, style, and
tone to more technical decisions like the
hardware platform you choose.
User research can seem daunting,
but often this can be as simple as talking
to staff and other team members who
have direct contact with customers in the
areas where you are considering adding
kiosks. Other ways to better understand
your audience include meeting with
customers to talk about their needs and
whether they would use a kiosk. You can
also look at any available demographic
information or footfall estimates for the
proposed area.
In ‘Studying Those Who Study Us’
anthropologist Diana Forsythe describes
a kiosk project created for migraine
patients. Patients could walk up to
the kiosk and get answers to basic
questions either before or after they
saw their physician. Sounds great, right?
Unfortunately, patients didn’t use the
kiosks and the project was declared a
failure. So why did the project fail? The
designers of the kiosks had skipped
talking to any patients, instead relying
on an interview with a single doctor to
tell them what he thought the patients
would want to know. In this situation,
a kiosk had several benefits – privacy,
time, objectivity, but by not adequately
understanding the motivations of its
target audience, these advantages were
easily negated.
Creating an interactive kiosk
is a balancing act between your
organisation’s goals and the goals of
your visitors. For a successful project,
these goals must overlap to create
an experience that provides value to
both parties. It’s one thing to set up a
kiosk to collect visitor information, for
example, but quite another to show
visitors how they benefit by sharing
their information. Without the second
piece in place, the kiosk will only
receive a fraction of the visits that could
otherwise be expected.
KIOSK solutions 23