Considering a kiosk project? Clearly defining the audience and purpose of your kiosks before starting out will help maximize your project’s chances of success.
The ubiquity of digital devices has fundamentally transformed consumer expectations for self-service technology. Today's users don't just expect touchscreens—they demand seamless, contactless, and intelligent interactions.
According to recent data from the Pew Research Center, 97 percent of Americans now own a cellphone of some kind, with 90 percent owning smartphones 1. This translates to a new level of familiarity and comfort with touch screens and increasing expectations about how technology can be used in our daily lives.
Those expectations are creating tremendous opportunities for interactive kiosks. Such devices can be an important part of a larger strategy to engage this new breed of digital consumers.
Modern kiosks serve diverse functions across industries, but the key advantage remains consistent: kiosks handle routine tasks efficiently while freeing staff for high-value, complex customer interactions.
The financial services industry exemplifies modern kiosk evolution. Banks now deploy AI-powered kiosks that can:
- Predict service needs based on transaction history
- Authenticate customers using biometric verification
- Process complex transactions previously requiring teller assistance
- Connect customers to remote specialists via video banking
This hybrid approach—combining self-service technology with human expertise—has become the gold standard across industries, with studies showing 73% of customers prefer businesses that offer both digital and human service options 2.
Although the benefits of a self-service kiosk are many, ensuring the success of a kiosk project requires some advance planning. The first step requires looking carefully at your expected user base and determining how and why they might engage with a kiosk.
Who is going to use these kiosks?
If the main goal of a kiosk project is to get someone to interact with your kiosks’ content or services, you must know who that someone, that target audience is. Your target audience can affect almost every decision you have to make - from design decisions like your interface, style, and tone to more technical decisions like the hardware platform you choose.
User research can seem daunting, but often this can be as simple as talking to staff and other team members who have direct contact with customers in the areas where you are considering adding kiosks.
Other ways to better understand your audience include meeting with customers to talk about their needs and whether they would use a kiosk. You can also look at any available demographic information or foot-traffic estimates for the proposed area.
In “Studying Those Who Study Us,” anthropologist Diana Forsythe describes a kiosk project created for migraine patients. Patients could walk up to the kiosk and get answers to basic questions either before or after they saw their physician. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, patients didn’t use the kiosks and the project was declared a failure.
So why did the project fail? The designers of the kiosks had skipped talking to any patients, instead relying on an interview with a single doctor to tell them what he thought the patients would want to know.
“The research team simply assumed that what patients wanted to know about migraine was what neurologists want to explain.”
Diana Forsythe, anthropologist 3
In this situation, a kiosk had several benefits - privacy, time, objectivity, but by not adequately understanding the motivations of its target audience, these advantages were easily negated.
Creating an interactive kiosk is a balancing act between your organization’s goals and the goals of your visitors. For a successful project, these goals must overlap, creating an experience that provides value to both parties.
It’s one thing to set up a kiosk to collect visitor information, for example, but quite another to show visitors how they benefit by sharing their information. Without the second piece in place, the kiosk will only receive a fraction of the visits that could otherwise be expected.
What functions will the kiosk serve?
Modern kiosk functionality extends far beyond basic transactions. It's also one part of the process where almost everyone has an opinion.
Different team members or departments often have very different priorities when it comes to adding functions to this sort of project. It’s easy to say, “Let’s make a kiosk that does it all!” but it’s often best to keep things simple.
Remember that in most cases, each visitor to your kiosk is a new user - you don’t want to overwhelm them with options. Carefully considering the additional complexity added by each task (and possibly some simple user testing) can help you decide whether a function improves the visitor’s overall experience or satisfies a critical requirement.
The number of options and type of information and/or tasks presented will vary based on the location and turnover required at the kiosk. A kiosk at a busy tradeshow would likely have more streamlined functionality (and faster average turnover) than an informational display in a gallery or museum.
If most people already own a smartphone, wouldn’t it be easier to just develop a mobile app?
Clearly, there’s an opportunity in the marketplace for both kiosks and mobile apps, and there are a few simple reasons why mobile apps won’t replace kiosks.
- App fatigue is real: The average smartphone user has 80+ apps but regularly uses only 9 4. Kiosks provide immediate access without app downloads.
- Situational advantages: Kiosks offer larger screens for complex tasks, dedicated hardware for specific functions, and consistent experiences regardless of device.
- Inclusive access: Not everyone has a compatible smartphone, sufficient data plans, or comfort with mobile technology. In some cases, poor cellular service and/or WiFi connectivity may make the use of a smartphone app difficult in some locations. Kiosks ensure equitable service delivery.
- Business control: Kiosks provide controlled environments for transactions, consistent branding experiences, and reduced fraud risk compared to mobile apps. In addition, there may be cases where the deployer wants to keep certain information on their own machines.
In light of these statistics and concerns, it only makes sense to offer customers a kiosk as an additional self-service channel.
Some parting thoughts
The bottom line? People are busy; if your kiosk doesn’t help them in some clear way they’ll go elsewhere.
Clearly defining the purpose for a kiosk project and the audience those kiosks will serve is instrumental in achieving project success. In addition, knowing exactly how you will define success is something that should be determined in the initial planning stages.
While it can be easy to gloss over these questions, taking the time to answer them early on can simplify the entire process for you and your team, increase engagement with your kiosks and result in a better experience for your visitors.
Footnotes
1. Source: Pew Research Center
2. Source: Salesforce - The State of the Connected Consumer
3. Source: Studying Those Who Study Us
4. Source: Localytics App Engagement Study
