April 2019 - The KioskSimple Blog

Selecting Kiosk Payment Devices, Don’t Paint Yourself into A Corner

This article is a cautionary tale about one of the costliest and easily avoidable mistakes companies make when developing their first payment kiosk.

One of the most common calls I get as a kiosk consultant is from a project manager or developer asking me how to integrate some payment device (i.e. a bill acceptor) into their kiosk application.

Then they’ll proceed to tell me how they’ve already developed 80% of their kiosk application in Swift (iOS), JavaScript (Web), etc and they “just” need to integrate some payment device in order to make their deadline in 3 weeks.

If you’re asking this question, then you messed up a long time ago.

Get to Market Faster with An MVP Kiosk

Today you’ll learn how you can get your first kiosk to market faster and for a smaller initial investment by creating an “MVP kiosk”.

Let’s talk about what an MVP is and why you should create an MVP kiosk.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development
Wikipedia

The benefits of building an MVP kiosk include…

Get to market faster
Smaller initial investment
Prioritize the features your customers care about
Avoid wasting time and money on the wrong features

Companies overbuild their first kiosk all the time. They assume they know exactly what their customers need and proceed to invest heavily, without gathering early customer feedback. Then they build the wrong thing and waste a bunch of time and money in rework.

If you want to avoid this common pitfall, keep reading…

Kiosk Hacking: 8 Tips to Harden Your Kiosk Security

It recently came out that a McDonalds kiosk in Australia was hacked. The following video shows two young men tricking the kiosk into giving them free food.

McDonald’s kiosk hack

Kiosk hacking has become common place in the news. In addition to the McDonald’s kiosk hack, HR kiosks have recently been hacked and there have also been incidents with smart city kiosks being hacked.

Self-service kiosks are everywhere from street corners to grocery stores and hackers are gunning for your customer’s data. Payment kiosks in particular are attractive targets because cardholder data is easy to monetize.

In this article I’m going to cover several techniques for hardening your kiosks security. Many of these kiosk hardening techniques involves functional changes to your kiosk application, so you’ll need to get your developers involved.