User experience in retail — designing for Kiosks and POS services
Why are some of the kiosks easy to use, making completing task a real pleasure, while other ones can cause such a headache? The key is design principles. Our expectations and experience are constantly changing, requiring a never-ending evolution. Have a quick look and familiarise yourself with what’s important when designing for large screens and which mistakes to avoid.
What makes our experience special? What’s that “something”?
Do you remember that feeling, when using your new smartphone for the first time? No training was needed, everything was so intuitive and straightforward. Yes, I felt the same. The same experience should apply to large screen products. It shouldn’t matter whether we’re designing a screen for a Fast Food Kiosk, a Betting Shop or a POS screen. Simplicity is the key. Keep in mind people using the product might be in a stressful situation or have a lack of privacy. Completing a task should involve minimum effort and time.
Before opening your favourite design tool, do the research.
Firstly, get to know your audience. Meet the people who are going to use the product, observe them in their natural environment.
Ask what difficulties they encountered. What was easy to complete? How did they feel? Listen carefully and narrow down your findings.
Yes, now you can open your chosen design tool and create a competitor analysis. What features are really useful? What could be improved? Is there anything that particularly caught your attention?
Look more widely — search for inspiration and decent ideas. If you’re designing a screen for a betting shop, also check out indirectly related products, e.g. a KFC Kiosk. This screen will be a perfect example, as the user has to complete their task in fast-paced environment in the minimum amount of time and effort.
What and why is it important?
Everyone has their own design process, but there are some key findings that should be taken into account.
To start with, establish the screen size, resolution and aspect ratio.
Ask at your kick-off meeting about the screen limitations. Are we able to swap, or are we limited to tapping? That’s one of the most important pieces of information, which is going to impact your design.
The top navigation bar should be reserved for the most important features. Remember that it’s not a private device — we’re aiming to spend as little time as possible.
Don’t forget about the search bar /filter— if we can’t find something in the first place and still have some patience, then we’re going to use the search bar. Highlight the results.
When creating a style guide, be consistent — make sure that there is enough contrast between the background and the appearing text. Establish a hierarchy and try to minimise different font styles and sizes. Make sure the buttons are visible and easy to read. Select your font wisely — great examples are the classic ‘Roboto’, or’ Helvetica’. Avoid serif family fonts.
The main CTA buttons (the ones which take you closer to completing the task, e.g. ‘next’, ‘add to basket’) should be coloured in an intuitive and visible colour, e.g green. Add icons providing more information to facilitate the client’s decision-making process.
If you create a POS screen for a hospitality-related establishment, such as a restaurant, consider grouping the buttons. List the available options/items, group and associate them with colours, e.g. drinks — blue, main course — green etc.
Remember to add a loading bar, including the percentage or remaining time for the page to load.
Add breadcrumbs to indicate to the user his current status on the page and journey he has been through; it’s the same as in a fairy tale, the visitors need to know their location.
Make sure the language used is easily understandable for everyone. Compose the text to provide people with decision-making clarity. Be concise, make sure every word on the screen has a purpose. Create short, scannable blocks and avoid double negatives. Make the copy consistent and try to replace technical terms with familiar words and phrases.
Common mistakes when designing for large screens.
Drop-down lists. Try to avoid drop-down menus, which are not the best solutions for large screens. They allow us designers to create many options without any further consideration, and as we know, having too many options demotivates customers.
A lack of confirmation dialogues. Have you deleted something valuable completely by mistake, and can’t get it back? Also, I know this feeling very well. Prevent the user from committing these errors or at least reduce the number of them. E.g. before clearing the shopping basket, add a confirmation screen to ensure that the user wants to take this action and didn’t tap this button by mistake.
Confusing the user; not communicating the following steps clearly enough, and adding a lot of unnecessary information. Remember, the person using the Kiosk or POS service has to complete the task ASAP. Presumably, there are a few other people queueing to use the machine. Simplicity is the key.
Last but no means least.
Conduct usability testing. Make sure chosen type and font size are easy to read and the interface is scannable (presented content, navigation elements as the layout can be scanned easily with picking up important information). See where potential customers encountered the problems and what made confusion.
