What I Did
- Conducted usability research on a convenience store kiosk
- Prototyped three iterations of a kiosk redesign
- Tools Used: Adobe XD
The Need: A More Engaging Customer Satisfaction Kiosk
Whenever I go to the Circle K in Elon, North Carolina to get gas, I answer the customer satisfaction survey. This survey is on the touchscreen kiosk above the card reader at the register.
This screen also asks if you want to buy a second item at a discount, displays your receipt, and shows commercials. However, most people never answer the survey or take advantage of the deals shown on the touchscreen.
After performing an informal usability test of this interface with five Elon University students, I discovered that many people think the kiosk only shows ads. This also confirmed that they never take advantage of the deals or the survey.
This sample said they would take advantage of additional discounts and answer the survey if they were given more incentive to do so. They usually rush through checkout and wouldn’t want to do anything to extend their store visit much further. With all of this information, I came up with a speculative redesign.
The Solution: A Straight-Forward Kiosk that Offers Discounts for Answering the Survey
I prototyped a new kiosk interface in Adobe XD that removes all of the commercials, makes all text more readable, outlines the user’s options for getting an extra item, and asks them if they’d like to sign up for Circle K Easy Rewards.
To give people similar to my users an incentive to answer the survey, they now get a minor discount when they answer the survey.
I made other decisions because my user sample said that the interface’s clutter and lack of clarity overwhelmed them. I simplified the design and made the instructions more specific to fix this. Part of this includes giving the user the option to walk back to get an extra discounted item or to have a store clerk get it for them.
They also didn’t know Circle K had a free discount card. I added that as an optional prompt on the last screen of the interface to raise consumer awareness of the Circle K Easy Rewards program.
The Process
To conduct the usability test, I went to Circle K with five test subjects. I then gave them money to buy a snack with and they then used the kiosk.
After I did this, I held one-on-one interviews with them to find out what they thought of the kiosk. I used the responses from the interviews to guide my prototype sketches.
I used critiques of my sketches from my usability research classmates to make tweaks to my design using Adobe XD. After getting more critiques for my first iteration of the Adobe XD prototype, I created the final version of it.
