A New GUI: Mobile, Self-service and information kiosks
With the surging mobile user segment coupled with cloud computing, we have a host of new options for touchscreen friendly interfaces.
The self-service and kiosk industry has struggled for years to settle on the ideal UI. Many customers use their existing website for not only content but as the main interface for a kiosk.
It wasn't so many years ago that we are breathed a sigh of relief at all the ATMs, and the airline check-in kiosks, and the Kodak photokiosks thinking to ourselves how users were now becoming comfortable with interacting with machines, and pressing buttons. We begged and borrowed and used parts of those to build "intuitive interface". Francie Mendelsohn of Summit can tell a lot of stories about interfaces (good and bad).
Nowadays, gven all of the new content publishing tools like Joomla and the rest (I use MovableType), now websites are perfectly templated with consistent stylesheet and content. That makes it easier to parse or walk a site programmatically and present a new templated view. We used to call these "lens" or portals and there is usually a javascript detection mechanism in the website which would redirect.
I've been looking at mobilizing my own websites and different ways to do it. One thing I am learning is that there are all types of mobilization cloud companies that will do the conversion for you, and offer any type of customization, and lots of nice "widgets" for special functions. I like widgets...
So I took a regular website and ran it thru one of the services. What I get is a great little mobile site, but also I can use that same design for my touchscreen kiosk.
For my test case I wanted to use a very "busy" or dense website. I was on www.modells.com who does sporting goods. Here is their main website.
You can click on it and see it larger but it is pretty busy...
Now, I load the url into my mobilization engine. I go thru a quick 4 steps and boom, instant mobile site...
Now it looks like this...
Much better, though not much use for my 19" LCD with touchscreen that typically runs 1280x1024.
But I can fix that. I can reset my browser so that it emulates mobile browser and I can override the resolutions.
Much much better...
Now I have a website with a mobile version but also pretty friendly ipad android mobile phone genre interface (which I am guessing most people are comfortable using).
If you have questions or comments please send to me: craig at kiosk.com or craig.keefner at gmail.com
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