News

Better kiosks through intelligent design

June 29, 2004

Design. It's the first thing that catches a customer's attention. It can also determine whether the customer will want to give the kiosk an initial try.

Unfortunately, many deployers focus on the guts of a kiosk and try to cut cost by skimping on design.

"One of the first things that comes up with every kiosk project is price," said Frank Olea, vice president of sales and marketing at Olea Exhibits. "Clients are very price sensitive."

Olea recently met with a client who claimed that the kiosk would be okay as long as everything inside worked.

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"Not true," Olea said. "You have people coming in who are going to put money in this machine. If it does not give the customer a feeling of security, they are not going to want to put money inside it."

Design vs. functionality

Olea is bothered by one design common among self-checkout kiosks.

"The components are all over the place. You have a touch screen over here and then you have to run down and put bills in over there, then the receipt prints out at the other end," Olea said.

"It was probably very economical to build it the way they did, but ergonomically it does not make sense."

He said Olea-designed kiosks try to strike a balance between the two: A customer should be able to use the kiosk easily, but the components shouldn't be mounted so that it has to be completely taken apart if a peripheral device goes bad.

This is especially important in a retail environment where you can't take a kiosk apart and spread the components across the floor.

Another factor, Olea said, is that many clients want flashy or extravagant designs.

"It's something that you definitely have to mange with the customer," said Olea. "You have to make sure they that they are not adding things that are there just because."

Olea tries to steer clients away from unnecessary cosmetic features. Instead, the company focuses on enhancements that improve the quality or the life span of the kiosk.

"We try to look at all the different components and all the different add-on features that we put into a kiosk to make sure it's not going overboard and it's not too much for the customer," said Olea. "Because if you increase the cost of the kiosk by $50, then you've got just that much longer that the ROI process is going to take."

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