Article

Design for the customer's experience

One of the easiest ways to control kiosk deployment costs is to use a systematic and scientific approach to designing ease of use into the customer experience. The process is called User Centered Design. 

July 25, 2004 by

Successful kiosk projects need to have a strong business case, be developed within technical constraints and meet the end user's goals by providing a valuable service. However, there is often enormous pressure to get the kiosk to market, and many kiosk projects focus more on deadlines, than ensuring success.

Since most kiosk solutions include software, which is relatively easy to change compared to the hardware, often the mindset is, "we can add functionality later" or "we can improve this over time." Just remember, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression on your kiosk customers, so the quick fire approach may lead to project failure.

One of the easiest ways to control costs is to get feedback from your end users throughout the kiosk's lifecycle. To accomplish this, usability specialists have a defined process called User Centered Design (UCD). It is a systematic and scientific approach to designing ease of use into the customer experience.

User Centered Design

UCD is an interactive process with four phases. It analyzes the user, the environment, and the tasks a user will accomplish. This analysis provides the details that determine usability goals and begins the application flow and User Interface. The UI includes everything that the user sees, hears, and touches including the kiosk surround, signage, hardware, software and audio clips.

The UI is determined during the design phase via prototypes that users can use. Users test the prototypes during the evaluation phase. Results of evaluations may lead to new ideas and new requirements that cause the analysis and design requirements to change. Iteration between the first three phases continues until usability requirements are met. The goal is a usable design that's implemented in the final development phase.

Analysis phase 

The analysis phase is the first step in the UCD process. For kiosks, it's important to understand the goals and requirements of the three project stakeholders. Conducting face-to-face interviews, observations, surveys and focus groups are techniques used to gather this information. The stakeholders are:

End users: This is the group the kiosk is intended to serve. End users are the primary target audience. If their requirements are not met, the kiosk will not be highly used. When gathering data from end users, it is important to learn:

• How will they use a kiosk in this environment?
• What will make them use this in-store kiosk as opposed to using the Internet or talking to a store employee?
• What type of technology do they currently use, how frequently and for what types of tasks?
• What are the current problems with the way they handle a specific task related to the kiosk functionality and how what would they change to make it better?

Management: This is the group that defines the business case for the kiosk. They are expecting the kiosk to increase sales, improve customer service, reduce labor costs and possibly more. They should be able to explain:

• What are the business goals for the kiosk?
• How will they measure project success?

Store employees: This group interacts with the end users when the kiosk is installed in the field. They can provide useful input such as:

• How will the kiosk help or hinder them in their daily tasks?
• What functions would help them and their customers?
• Where should the kiosk be placed and why?

The resulting data from the stakeholders is valuable in defining the functionality that makes the kiosk a success. This type of analysis also leads to a list of easily prioritized features and functions based on actual user data.

Design

Data collected during the analysis phase provides insight into the desired functionality, users relate to when performing kiosk tasks. This input is used to design the kiosk's physical surround, hardware layout and the software's look and feel.

The first step in the design process is to flowchart the application in a way that best matches the steps from the user task analysis. This helps to identify what information goes on which screen and how to navigate through the entire application.

The next step is to prototype the design. Prototyping provides a means of building something that end users can actually see and use to evaluate the early design concepts. A prototype may be designed with just partial functionality in order to get user feedback on the most common tasks or ones that may cause usability problems. Prototyping is critical to finding out the big problems early when it is still cheaper to fix them.

Evaluation

User evaluation is the only accurate measure of the design meeting usability goals. Often there are no right or wrong designs; there are just some designs that work better (for users) than others. By setting usability goals, you can determine when your design meets the criteria.

Informal evaluation methods include design walk-through and expert reviews. Evaluation at this level helps to validate functionality, task flow and utility. Expert reviews involve a usability expert that evaluates the design and determines where potential usability problems exist. These types of reviews can eliminate a majority of usability issues.

More formal evaluation methods include usability testing. Usability testing involves recruiting end users to perform specific tasks and then measuring how well they succeed.  Measurements often include time on task, number of errors made, number of requests for help, ease of use ratings and other subjective ratings. This data is used to identify any usability problems and better ways to perform tasks.
 
It's critical that the kiosk go through usability testing prior to pilot. This testing needs to be done with a prototype or beta version of the physical surround, hardware and software since the user will eventually use all of these components.

Implementation

Once met, usability goals can be implemented in the design. In the UCD process it's important to specify all aspects of the design that impact usability such as the layout, navigation and graphics. Typically, UI specifications are written to describe the details of the layout, the navigation and explain why design decisions were made. The implementation document is useful to make sure old ideas are not revisited.

Finally, a style guide that describes the behavior of each of the various controls (buttons, lists, data entry forms, error messages) as well as the defining the look and feel in terms of font style, color usage, typeface, and graphic effects is very useful. A style guide helps ensure that different developers follow the same standards when implementing the design.

[Editor's note: Info Touch Technologies became Tio Networks in April 2006.]