Commentary

How to plan your kiosk workflow

Planning your kiosk workflow allows you to better understand your vision and to convey that vision to a designer.

Image courtesy of iStock

July 1, 2019 by Andrew Savala — CEO, KioskSimple

Planning your kiosk workflow is an essential part of the kiosk design process and an easy first step that even non-designers can implement.

A kiosk workflow is simply an outline of the screens your customers will encounter while using your kiosk. A workflow is helpful when designing a kiosk. It allows you to know where certain screens, such as user stories and wireframes — rough sketches of what each kiosk screen will look like — will be positioned.

Creating a kiosk workflow outline is a precursor to later steps in the design process, and a simple way to get started quickly. We're going to create an ordered list of all our kiosk screens. You can throw together your list in Word, an email, etc., without any special design software.

The first step is to list all the kiosk features. The second step is to separate the features into initial release and subsequent release features.

Our next step is to put together a payment kiosk workflow which incorporates our desired feature set.

The kiosk workflow outline

Let's start by defining our example kiosk feature set. In this example we're designing a payment kiosk for use at a county jail. We want the customer to be able to search for an inmate and load funds on the inmate's account.

This example could be adopted for a wide range of payment kiosk applications including ordering food, vehicle registration, paying a cell phone bill, etc.

The following is a list of our payment kiosk's key features:

Search for an inmate.
Load funds in cash or credit on the inmate's account (no change given).
Offer a receipt (print, email or text message).
Attract customers to engage with the kiosk instead of opting for the cashier's line.
Restart the workflow if the kiosk is idle.

Next, we're going to create a workflow outline of the kiosk screens our customer will interact with in order to load funds on an inmate's account.

We expect the customer to approach our kiosk, search for their desired inmate, select a payment method, make a payment and finally have the option to get a receipt.

Our payment kiosk workflow looks like the following:

Screen 1: Attract screen. This entices the customer to engage with our kiosk.
Screen 2: Search for an inmate.
Screen 3: Confirm we've found the correct inmate (show additional inmate details like photo, gender, DOB, etc.).
Screen 4: Select desired payment method (cash or credit).
Screen 4a: If credit, ask the customer how much they would like to load on the inmate's account.
Screen 5: Accept payment (cash or credit).
Screen 6: Thank you for your order.
Screen 7: Ask customer if they'd like a receipt.
Screen 8: Option to print, email or text receipt.

Kiosk idle timeout

Another important, but often overlooked aspect to our kiosk workflow is what happens if the customer walks away in the middle of their transaction.

There's not one simple answer here, because how this should be handled depends on the context. The obvious answer is simply to restart the kiosk workflow over from the beginning if the kiosk is idle for an extended period of time. But what happens if the customer is inserting cash and they're digging around in their wallet for another bill?

If the customer is not in the middle of making a payment, we should display an overlay screen asking if they're still there. If they do not respond after 30 seconds, then we can restart the workflow back to the attract screen once the idle timeout has expired.

If the customer is in the middle of making a payment, we should do all of the following:

Display a warning overlay screen asking if they're still there.
Give them some extra time (i.e., 60 seconds).
Complete their payment automatically if they do not respond.
Restart the kiosk workflow back to the attract screen.

Automatically completing the payment allows us to gracefully close out the customer's transaction.

Once your kiosk workflow is defined, the next step is creating wireframes, which are rough sketches of what each kiosk screen will look like. Wireframes are typically created by a designer using specialty design software like Sketch.

Planning your kiosk workflow allows you to better understand your vision and to convey that vision if you are working with a designer.

About Andrew Savala

Andrew Savala is the COO of BIxby, with a background in designing and deploying payment kiosk systems. He offers consulting services to companies looking to develop their payment kiosks.

Connect with Andrew: