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Commentary: Usability can be a kiosk's kiss of death or its ticket to success

Usability and the user experience are critical to the success of any new consumer technology, especially customer-facing kiosks.

July 6, 2009 by

As more and more technology is introduced to the marketplace, consumers are becoming increasingly fickle about their adoption of it. Gone are the times when a company could develop a widget with all the bells and whistles that could still be profitable, even if it took an end-user three weeks to figure out how to change any of the settings. Think of the old VHS players and how most people couldn't even set the clocks. But now, consumers have so many options that it's more important to develop a product that they find usable and intuitive. In fact, I would argue that entire companies have failed because their products have lacked these characteristics.

Usability and the user experience are especially critical to the success of a kiosk program, which directly interacts with a consumer and is meant to be successful in a self-service manner, without human assistance. If someone tries to use a kiosk, whether it is for airline check-in, movie rental, coin counting or health screening, and the experience isn't nailed down, he won't become a repeat user, or worse, he will discourage others from using it.

The understanding that technology companies are gaining of the user experience is becoming ever more obvious. Look at the leaps in improvement seen in cell phone navigation or GPS use. Only a handful of years ago, these devices had owner's manuals that were thicker than most college engineering text books, and it took an end-user every page to figure out how to use them. Now, one can typically pick up the device and intuitively navigate through the most basic and heavily used functions without much effort.

While I would argue that this is more art than science, there is an element of human factor analysis and determining someone's mental model that aids designers in creating a great user experience. There are a handful of firms that really understand how technology and human interaction can be combined seamlessly to create a rich experience.

SoloHealth's experience

SoloHeath's EyeSite is a self-service vision screening kiosk meant to educate consumers on the importance of eye health and motivate them to get comprehensive eye exams. The service is free for consumers and typically placed in high-traffic retail environments. Through the creation of this kiosk, we at SoloHealth have discovered firsthand the importance of the user experience.

We are asking consumers to interact with technology in a way they never have before. While most people have had a traditional eye exam or screening, either at their eye care practitioner or early in school, they have always had instructions and continuous feedback about the process, usually from live people. So when we automate the process and leave the pace, procedure, inputs and interpretation to the end-user, it leaves room for frustration, misunderstanding and worst of all, abandonment.

One of the best things that we have done is to spend a good amount of time developing the user experience through quick and dirty testing, before spending one minute writing software code. This is the single biggest piece of advice I can give to another kiosk or product developer. Test your product as easily and efficiently as you can. In SoloHealth's case, we created a paper mockup of various screen designs and ran a host of novice users through the paper mockup. We could quickly iterate our designs, message, application flow and communication tools in a matter of minutes. This helped us get 80 percent of the experience nailed down before investing any time or dollars in the software. As most people know, iterating a product through multiple prototypes is very timely and costly.

Once we had a product that worked and a user experience with which we were comfortable, we tested just one kiosk. This way, we could gauge real consumer experiences and refine the product further, before getting too many units produced and having to manage a network.

We are continuously measuring completion rate and where in the program a user drops out of the application, as well as conducting intercept tests to understand consumer reaction and overall consumer satisfaction of the user experience. We constantly test new ways to communicate information, including different button styles, locations on the screen, simpler screen layouts, etc. The continuous improvement process is never-ending, and the minute you take your eye off of your product and the consumer behavior, you leave the door open for your competition.

As technology gets more sophisticated, consumers do as well, but their innate human behavior still influences how they use products. If you can find the mental model through which the majority of consumers look at life and the lens through which they filter things, you can harness this to your advantage.

The writer is vice president of operations and development for SoloHealth. To submit a comment, please e-mail the editor, Caroline Cooper.