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Self-service network audience: The benefits of the transient user

October 10, 2011 by Michael Ionescu — President, Ionescu Technologies

When we first started our kiosk company, our first graphical user interface was a stylized design that used heavy doses of a sky blue color and a gaudy yellow. At the time we beamed with pride at our creation. It wasn't until we saw a draft of a new interface design, submitted by our intern at the time, that our pride was slowly replaced with distaste.

Once we began implementing the new design, we became very self-conscious about how tacky the old one was and were plagued by concerns. Had we turned off any potential users with the old look? Did people look at it and see the shortcomings that were now obvious to us?

When considering the kiosk user audience, however, a lot of these worries and questions aren't as dire as you might think. A kiosk is not a product that a customer is buying and putting in their home to use every day. The average kiosk user is someone who is out in a public place and using it to find information or make a purchase. In most cases this transaction is going to last less than five minutes.

So first and foremost, you need to design an interface that's simple enough for someone to use in that amount of time without getting confused. While this target audience is difficult to nail down because of its diversity, the benefit is that it is a completely fluid audience. One person leaves and the next one arrives in a constant sequence. This leaves tons of room open for experimentation.

Based on your usage statistics, you can continuously monitor how people use your system and adapt accordingly. Each day (I'm speaking figuratively here) is a chance to implement a different feature or tweak an existing one to make your system more successful and inviting.

Even little changes can have a profound impact. To give you an example, my company specializes in building interactive way-finding guides. Years ago, we had a screen saver welcome screen that was designed to attract users to the machine and explain a little bit about the functionality. The number of users didn't increase much after implementation so we tried to figure out a better way of doing the welcome screen. Now we do a flash-based animation that introduces users to the kiosk. After that implementation traffic immediately increased.

I've learned that kiosk software/interface is one of the most important pieces to your network, and you don't need to be afraid to tweak the software, provided your kiosks can be updated over a network; otherwise you're going to be severely upsetting your on-site maintenance crew.

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