Interaction design for retail spaces in India
Well, here’s the thing right, developing countries, especially India, have been adopting new technology in the past few years in a very robotic(see what i did there?) fashion. If you look at the past few years, whatever technological interventions have come in, they have just been adapted but not really tweaked keeping the Indian context in mind.
Most of the retail space self check out or interactive product screens seem to be white-labelled solutions that have been just added to the stores without considering the context and behaviour patterns of the Indian consumer.
While it is true that we as a country skipped the laptop phase and jumped into the mobile phase, it is important to realise that acquisition of consumers with the mobile phone phase, took a lot of tweaking on the phone- design, structure, language as well as availability.
The same seems to be happening with digital interfaces in retail spaces, just that there is absolutely no thought in how to design the interface keeping the context and consumer in mind. If we really think about it, we seldom see people using these screens to their full potential. The only ones i think have been used a little, are the airport check-in and the atm machine, both with extremely archaic design that has been around for ages.
When it comes to designing interfaces for digital spaces, i feel that there are certain things that need to be looked at:
Active Audience
We as a people are extremely conscious of who and how many people are looking at what we are doing. If we have large screens in a retail space, it will end up becoming a spectacle of sorts, which means that the person actually interacting with the screen will be conscious of what they are doing.

How do you tackle something like this. There are multiple ways depending on the space and purpose of the screen, some of which are considering the following;
- Placement of the screen
- Angle at which it is placed
- Secret mode with side lift panels
- Screens designed where you cannot see the screen from an angle
Group Dynamics
Who we shop with, really affects the way we shop, that is one of the reasons we take our friends to shop with us. Which is still a very “Cool” kids thing to do, many grown Indian men and women still go shopping with their parents. It’s important to consider the kind of groups that frequent your store, also study the group dynamics of the target segment for your brand. It makes a huge difference to what interfaces people will or will not interact with.

some examples:
Fancy mall with huge brands | Couple
- Most likely the man will be waiting with little interest in anything around, what can the screen do for him?
Big Bazaar | Mom and son
- While the mom is making most of the functional decisions, the son is looking for something he can buy, how do you enhance that experience.
Fashion store | 3 friends | 20–25yr olds | Mid level
- While there is generally one of the friends who is looking at buying something for an occasion or otherwise, the other 2 friends are guiding and aiding the decision with just yes and nos. How do you leverage this situation.
Onboarding
People have their phones all the time, they use it almost 50 times a day, it’s ok in that case, to rely on them “figuring it out”. Apple does that a LOT. Most of it has to be figured out.

Depending on the type of audience, they will have had access to certain kinds of apps and interfaces, which well, gives them some sort of a subconscious guide to use the retail screens. But can we really rely on that when people have a max of 8–10 second attention span when it comes to a screen in a public space.
A good Onboarding overlay is a must in these scenarios, when the person knows what kind of swipes and touches does the screen react to, he/she feels more confident about how they look while interacting with the screen.
Relatively Convenient:
What is convenience to the Indian audience? We are constantly selling quicker alternatives using technology, but have we ever stopped to consider if that is what convenience is to the customer.
If quicker alternatives was convenience to the Indian audience, then you wouldn’t see escalators crowded with people standing rather than walking. Across the world escalators are the quicker way, where you have 2 lanes- walk and stand depending on context. Only in India do people take the escalator and stand on it when they know it takes the same time to stand on the escalator and take the stairs.

It is because most of us look at ease as convenience and not time.
But for some reason we are selling the kiosks as quicker ways with more work for the user, which defeats the purpose, and it is possibly why we see most kiosks empty at airports.
Whatever the kiosks do, they need to have lower input and an enhanced offering for people to adopt these interfaces.
Maybe it’s time we stopped adapting and started creating, based on our user+context.
