opinion
to retrofit over 500 kiosks already in field
was tremendous, and a painful lesson
about using consumer grade equipment
for commercial applications.”
See through the eyes of the
end user
Although a deployment may look good on
paper from the deployer’s point of view,
it’s easy to forget that part of the goal of
using self-service technology is to create a
great user experience.
Furniture maker IKEA has long used
kiosks that allow shoppers to sign up for
their loyalty programs, and those devices
generally garnered positive reviews.
Unfortunately, the company stumbled in
their venture into self-checkout kiosks.
While most IKEA stores featured both self-
service and cashier-operated checkout
lanes, during the deployment the
company only opened the cashier lanes
on peak shopping days. On other days,
no cashiers were available, and shoppers
3
various health issues in a reader-friendly
format, the kiosks dispensed what
amounted to a medical school textbook
entry on whatever disease the user
wanted to learn about.
“Let’s say you wanted something
about one of the signs of impending
heart problems,” Mendelsohn said. “You
got maybe 20 pages in at best eight
point font. It was just unusable from a
customer point of view. They had the
opportunity to allow people to sign up
for their newsletters and to promote the
sale of their publications while offering
information, but they just went about it all
wrong.”
Use commercial components
Trying to get by with consumer
grade components in a commercial
deployment is a recipe for disaster. Using
cheap components may save money up
front, but it’s likely to cost much more
over time in maintenance, lost sales
and the eventual replacement of those
components.
2
"A report issued by Stratistics MRC
predicts that the market will reach
$88.34 billion by 2022"
In addition, multiple breakdowns are
likely to foster distrust of the kiosks even
when they are operational. If customers
approach the kiosk and it’s out of order
they may come back a second time, but if
the device is out of order this time they’re
likely never to return.
Jamie Richter, regional sales manager
at commercial touchscreen provider Elo,
encountered such a situation with a large
deployment. “A kiosk fixture company
chose to use consumer-grade flat panel
TVs inside a kiosk to save money, and
after running 24/7 the panels overheated
and started smoking within the kiosk
enclosure,” Richter said. “The fixture
company had to not only remove all of
the panels inside the kiosks, but also
replace them with new panels. The cost
were directed to the self-checkout kiosks.
The scanners quickly became a source
of frustration. “A lot of the stuff you buy at
IKEA comes in big boxes, so you can’t just
pick it up and pass it across the scanner,”
Mendelsohn said. “They did have these
handheld devices that were tethered to
the kiosks, but the tether wasn’t very long,
and if you didn’t approach correctly the
scanner couldn’t read the code.”
In addition, there were no instructions
on how to use the handheld scanners,
leaving shoppers guessing about what to
do. “Because this was so frustrating, a lot
of people, myself included, just picked up
the merchandise or wheeled the cart to
another one and eventually checked out,”
Mendelsohn said. Eventually, the negative
feedback from customers grew so great
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