The increased use of self-service kiosks in retail continues as retailers face a range of challenges, including cost pressures, employee shortages and increased customer expectations. While self-service kiosks can help retailers and businesses address many of these challenges, they can only do so when they are developed with a design-led approach focused on delivering a great user experience. It is surprising how many interactive kiosk solutions do not consider design and, as a result, do not deliver the significant efficiency, sales and profitability improvements they are capable of. This is a significant missed opportunity to delight customers, increase sales and build retention by encouraging customers to return to your business after a great experience.
Adopting a design-led approach to self-service kiosks enables you to maximise the benefits that kiosks can bring your business. Whether you opt for an existing product family solution or a bespoke solution, following a design-led approach that takes key design principles into account is critical to the success of your self-service kiosk adoption. Discover the fundamental design principles that you should follow when adopting self-service kiosks, including user-friendliness, easy accessibility, hardware reliability, user ergonomics, customisation, and branding.
While many design principles significantly influence the design of self-service kiosks, a number of design principles are critical to the development of successful self-service kiosk solutions in Retail, hospitality, and the wider business environment. Applying these design principles to the design of your kiosks will help you maximise their benefits while delighting the customers who will use them.
User-friendliness is a critical element of self-service kiosk design. Even the most technically advanced and innovative kiosks are unlikely to deliver the excellent user experience and efficiency gains they are capable of without a user-friendly design. User-friendliness is often approached from a user-interface perspective, which invariably drives the focus towards software. But user-friendliness extends far beyond the software that powers your self-service kiosk. It also involves the hardware you select and your kiosk's overall design. Achieving the best possible kiosk solution requires close collaboration between hardware and software suppliers, ensuring their components are well integrated into the overall design.
Your choice of hardware can have a significant bearing on the user-friendliness of your kiosk, so if you are committed to prioritising user-friendliness, careful hardware choices should be made. The key consideration should be: How can the selected hardware help customers complete the task for which they are using your self-service kiosk? Whether that is looking for information, checking in, pre-ordering or completing a checkout/payment process, multiple hardware items will likely be used. Whatever the task is, there is one hardware item that is always front and centre and key to user-friendliness: the touchscreen. The touchscreen is at the heart of every user experience, and delivering an optimal experience that delights the customer relies on a great touchscreen. When your self-service kiosk has a high-quality integrated touchscreen, the customer can easily interact with the user interface and, as the retailer/business intended, free from unnecessary delays or the frustration of trying to interact with an unresponsive screen. This helps them complete their task quickly and maintain an efficient throughput for the kiosk, both of which are key to overall user-friendliness.
The importance of user-friendliness also extends to the other hardware items your self-service kiosk is likely to have. In a retail setting, where the self-service kiosk provides self-checkout capability, the scanner/barcode reader also plays a vital role in facilitating the easy scanning of products. The NFC reader and card payment terminals will support the collection of digital payments by providing customers with contactless and non-contactless payment options for easy checkout. Meanwhile, for other applications, such as registration or information, the integrated printer and in-built camera and microphone may play a more important role in allowing the printing of tickets or communications with customer service via the kiosk. In every application, selecting the highest quality hardware available and considering how each hardware item is integrated and positioned on the self-service kiosk can make all the difference to its user-friendliness.
At Pan Oston, we place user-friendliness at the heart of our self-service kiosks and have earned a reputation for award-winning design across our kiosk product families. We help retailers and businesses develop kiosk solutions that deliver an exceptional user experience and the highest possible levels of user-friendliness. Our award-winning design team collaborates closely with customers to adapt the basic configuration of our self-service kiosk families, including the Red Dot Design award-winning BLUE FIRE family, or develop an entirely tailor-made solution customised to suit our customers’ requirements. In both cases, we use high-quality retail-grade hardware items to develop kiosk solutions that are both stylish and functional with user-friendliness at their heart.
Accessibility is essential as it helps make self-service kiosks available and usable to the wide range of people likely to interact with them. A kiosk’s design can be a great enabler when it comes to accessibility, and a little intelligent design goes a long way. From the required number of kiosks and their optimal location in your shop, the actual physical design of the kiosk, and the software features programmed into it, there are many ways to deliver great accessibility to customers. Popular in-built software features include helping customers receive audio instructions, increasing font sizes or activating a dark mode to improve readability.
In terms of physical design, accessibility is improved by minimising or removing space-restricting hardware items, making a touchscreen angled, and ensuring that NFC readers and chip-and-pin readers are positioned at a suitable height for most users.
By designing your self-service kiosks with accessibility in mind, you can address many issues that may arise as different customers interact with your kiosks. Customers are not going to be the same height or even have the same level of technical proficiency, for example, so adjusting your kiosk to cater for these is crucial in maintaining accessibility to all. Some customers may also have special accessibility needs, which must be catered for wherever possible. Customers who use wheelchairs are just one example of a customer group likely to have additional accessibility requirements when using self-service kiosks. It is essential to consider how customers in wheelchairs can access the touchscreen, scanner and chip-and-pin device. While accessibility at a self-service kiosk is, of course, guided by relevant accessibility regulations, such as the European Accessibility Act that comes into force on 1 July 2025, the most successful approach to accessibility is to go above and beyond what is required to deliver self-service kiosks that are accessible to all.
Pan Oston is committed to creating self-service solutions that are accessible to all and are as inclusive as possible. We have developed adaptations to our existing product families to enhance accessibility further, which include changes to screen heights, the height and reach of hardware items, creating knee and foot space at a kiosk and providing unobstructed floor space for wheelchair access. Our accessibility improvements also extend into many other areas, including providing alternatives to using a touchscreen, providing Braille instructions, enabling audio navigation with text-to-speech and positioning touchscreen controls and buttons in the lower half of a touchscreen.
Customers expect self-service kiosks to be available and ready to operate whenever needed. If one or several self-service kiosks are out of order, it can undermine the very purpose of many kiosk-based solutions – delivering fast and efficient service to customers. While delivering 100% reliability is unfeasible, it is possible to maintain a high level of reliability by carefully selecting hardware items for your self-service kiosk and, wherever possible, simplifying the servicing/repair process. Selecting high-quality business/retail-grade components for your self-service kiosks can significantly increase their overall reliability, whereas opting for lower cost or low-functionality alternatives will likely undermine it and result in disruptive kiosk downtime. Investing in higher-quality components is the most effective way to deliver the best possible hardware reliability while also future-proofing your business for upcoming technological advances.
In practice, achieving high levels of hardware reliability also means simplifying the service and maintenance of your self-service kiosks. In many cases, it is now possible to deliver remote support to resolve a wide range of issues causing kiosk downtime. This reduces the likely wait time for an available engineer, as arranging a physical visit to the kiosk will not be necessary. In cases where a repair/maintenance visit is required, your business will benefit from having self-service kiosks that allow easy access to its key components for faster repairs. Some kiosks can be quite restrictive in terms of repairs in that they require you to remove multiple hardware components to access a single component in a different part of the kiosk. Choosing a self-service kiosk that has been designed with service-friendliness in mind will help minimise customer disruption and kiosk downtime.
At Pan Oston, we develop all our self-service kiosks using high-quality retail-grade components recognised for their robustness and reliability. We always strive for higher-quality components as we recognise hardware's critical role in maintaining kiosk solutions' reliability. In addition, we have simplified the service and maintenance of our self-service solutions by placing service-friendliness at the heart of our self-service kiosks. We have made it easy to replace components and perform routine maintenance tasks on our kiosks. The smart design of our kiosks makes almost every component within them accessible from the front so service technicians can access the components they need faster and reduce any downtime that will inconvenience customers.
Ergonomics is another design consideration for self-service kiosks. While customer ergonomics is often considered relatively extensively, the ergonomics for employees and maintenance engineers who support self-service kiosks are frequently overlooked. The primary consideration regarding ergonomics should be to provide a comfortable experience to all users of self-service kiosks. Providing improved ergonomics at self-service kiosks starts with the optimal placement of your kiosk so customers and staff can easily access it.
In addition to the optimal placement of self-service kiosks, ergonomics can be improved by setting the kiosk at a height that accommodates both standing and seated customers. While this can be a challenging balance to reach, it will help your kiosk remain accessible to the highest possible number of customers. Some self-service kiosks further enhance ergonomics with tilted screens, improving visibility in all light conditions and reducing glare when bright lights are present. Our award-winning self-service kiosk family, BLUE FIRE, incorporates a tilted touchscreen in all but one of its models to deliver optimal ergonomics and make using the kiosk for more extended interactions comfortable and intuitive.
Many self-service kiosks also benefit from ergonomically friendly hardware devices such as well-angled card readers that make inserting a bank card easy, reachable receipt printers so receipts can be easily collected, and an accessible NFC contactless payment point to help users with limited mobility make payments. The layout of hardware devices on the kiosk should reflect their frequency of use. For different purposes, such as pre-ordering, checking in, accessing information, and processing payments, the device that customers interact with the most should be positioned prominently on the kiosk.
Every well-designed self-service kiosk incorporates extensive options for customisation and branding. A standard kiosk product family will not always suit the precise requirements of a given retailer/business. This makes it necessary to customise the self-service kiosk to the application that it is intended for. For example, a self-service kiosk used as an information kiosk to provide directions and shop searching capabilities in a shopping centre does not need an NFC payment terminal, a chip & pin card payment machine or a barcode scanner. In contrast, a self-service kiosk used as a food ordering kiosk in a fast-food restaurant will require all of those hardware options. While it is often sensible to future-proof a self-service kiosk to a degree in case its required function changes, it is sub-optimal and possibly even confusing for a kiosk to be configured with hardware items that are not required for its intended purpose.
In terms of branding, it is possible to fully integrate and reflect the brand identity of your business in your self-service kiosk. The most successful self-service solutions are often completely integrated into the retail environment or business environment where they are located. This is best achieved through a custom design where a self-service kiosk needs to be integrated into a specific type of counter or more simple branding options, including sublimation or device painting to incorporate your business’s brand identity and colour scheme on the self-service kiosk itself.
At Pan Oston, we help established retailers and businesses customise and brand self-service solutions to suit their specific requirements. Our award-winning design team is adept at customising self-service kiosks to suit particular applications and use cases and providing full branding options to ensure that a business’s colour scheme and brand identity are reflected in the self-service kiosks they adopt.
Pan Oston has created innovative design-led solutions for established retailers and businesses since 1969. Our award-winning design team creates innovative self-service kiosks that deliver exceptional customer experiences, improved efficiency and increased sales. Modern yet functional design is at the heart of everything we do at Pan Oston. Multiple Red Dot Design awards have recognised our design proficiency, including one for our popular BLUE FIRE self-service kiosk family.
Why not find out how our two self-service kiosk product families, BLUE FIRE and ESSENCE, can deliver an innovative and exceptionally well-designed self-service solution for your business? Both product families offer an almost endless range of customisation options to suit a wide range of retail and business applications. For businesses seeking a self-service kiosk solution that is entirely bespoke, our Tailor-Made products are a great option as they offer a world of possibilities and a truly extensive range of options. Whether you choose our BLUE FIRE, ESSENCE or Tailor- Made self-service kiosks, your business will benefit from award-winning design, software & hardware independence and easy servicing options to help future-proof your business.
By partnering with Pan Oston, you can benefit from the extensive experience and expertise our growing team of over 200 specialists has gained from supporting established international retailers and businesses by developing innovative design-led self-service solutions.
Our self-service kiosk specialists are ready to help you develop an innovative self-service solution that suits your specific business requirements. Why not get in touch with us and discuss how we can help you delight your customers with a design-led self-service solution?
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