Whiz Bang vs paper

Leave it to my comedian friend Geoff Surratt to trigger my weekly blog post. Geoff is blogging today about kiosks over on his blog:
http://geoffsurratt.typepad.com/inner_revolution/2007/09/kiosk-heaven.html

Which reminds me of a story and a lesson. A previous post by one of my blogging colleagues below reminds of a similar point.

Way back in the mid to late 90’s a met a guy who was serving a church and had a great idea. His idea was to have large churches use multiple kiosks around their sites to help new attenders and members alike to access directions, small group connection information, where to take your kids during worship and the like.

It was going to be touch-screen driven (just like the airline ticket kiosks are now) and enable anyone to get information at anytime.

 Now remember, this was before the widespread adoption of the Web, wifi ubiquity and putting much of
that information at one’s fingertips regardless of time and place.

 As you can well imagine, the system was hard to implement. You had to get all the departments to work together to get their information on it. You had to design an intuitive interface to help guide folks through the maze of information. You had to plan for enough kiosks to service those that wanted to use them.

A few churches got real excited about this type of thing and contracted to do it.

When they finally rolled out the machines, after quite a bit of development, you can guess how it worked. First, they were ignored. (What is this thing?) With lots of promotion and screen time some tried to use them. But the time it took to route through the maze was excessive which led to user frustration and a line to use the machine. It would be much quicker and much more personal just to have a person answer the question.

 

What reminded me of all this was a recent visit to a church building where I actually saw one of the machines. Along a broad foyer corridor were nicely decorated rows of tables with attractive racks of cards and handouts (paper) with big signs clearly identifying which area of ministry this table served. Over in the corner was a primitive computer looking kiosk, unplugged and unused.

I asked about it and someone commented, “we occasionally plug it in and hook it into the network so someone can go to our web site to find some obscure information, but that machine didn’t have wifi so we have to cable it in….so mostly we just tell them to look it up when they get home.”

Eighty percent of the information and questions could be answered on a small, attractively designed card that they could personally hand to a another person and say “This will help remind you of the event, activity, location, time, etc.”

Comments

[Joe Suh]

Reminds me of a Deep Thought by Jack Handy: "Instead of raising your hand to ask a question in class, how about individuals push buttons on each desk? That way, when you want to ask a question, you just push the button and it lights up a corresponding number on a tote board at the front of the class. Then all the professor has to do is check the lighted number against a master sheet of names and numbers to see who is asking the question." - Jack Handy