Kiosks are becoming common tools for businesses to streamline functions and transactions that have traditionally been handled by humans. They are fast, convenient, self-serving, cost-effective, and engaging. With touchscreen gadgets filling the hands, desks, and pockets of consumers, kiosk interfaces make for a familiar experience to millions of consumers. According to Summit Research Association, at the end of 2009 there were 1.8 million kiosks worldwide (excluding ATMs), with 1.2 million in North America alone. You can find them in airports, movie theaters, health care facilities, banks, fast-food restaurants, and retail stores.
On that note, there’s an article in the most recent issue of Connected World Magazine that discusses the competitive advantages offered by kiosks and spotlights the Disney kiosk app created and developed by PointAbout. The kiosk app is being placed in Disney retail stores all across the country. The app utilizes Apple’s iPad and allows consumers to browse Disney products, share information and comments via Facebook and Twitter, watch videos, and view a calendar of local and national events.
PointAbout’s Pete Johnson, our President of Professional Services said the iPad is a good device to be used in kiosks because it is a relatively inexpensive device, and one that is familiar to many consumers.
Below is the excerpt from the article.
Connected World | Jan/Feb 2011
Help Yourself by Cindy Dubin
Self-service kiosks turn convenience into a competitive advantage.The Magic Kiosk
Hooking consumers up with products is no Mickey Mouse operation for PointAbout Inc. The three-year-old mobile application developer recently created the Disney retail store kiosk app, which is showing up in redesigned retail stores across the country.
According to Pete Johnson, vice president of professional services at PointAbout, the kiosk idea was developed with the Apple iPad tablet in mind. “The touchscreen application is something that is familiar and attractive to consumers, not intimidating,” he says.
The goal of the kiosk, says Johnson, is to make the experience functional, engaging, and informing to the customers. Thanks to an OpenGL (open graphics library), a standard language for generating 2D and 3D animation, Disney characters reach our of a rotating shield for the Washington, D.C.-based company.
To browse the various Disney product lines, the user spins a swirl of clouds and taps the cloud containing the products of interest. Customers can research and identify any of the Disney products, whether carried in the store or not. They can comment on the new store and post their comments right to Facebook and Twitter, watch videos, locate stores, and view a calendar of events nationally and locally.
From the retailer’s perspective, the kiosk provides improved customer satisfaction, and invites customers to stay inside the store longer, which potentially leads to greater sales.
The iPad built into the Disney kiosk uses Wi-Fi for connectivity. To ensure that fresh information, such as store schedules, products, and store locations get to the kiosk, a Mac mini is collocated with the iPad to provide application software updates.
“An iPad kiosk app uses the same form of communications as most iPads (in use today)- Wi-Fi to a hosted Web service in the cloud. The critical elements of this are connectivity via Wi-Fi, and secondly, the ability of the kiosk app to process momentary drops in communications,” says Johnson.
He says the iPad is a good kiosk device because it is inexpensive, and as an Apple product, is familiar to most consumers. To date, the kiosk app is now rolled out in a handful of stores.
