Expert advice for developing, deploying and managing self-service kiosks
Have you ever wanted to start your kiosk project, but found an excuse to delay the launch and the project fizzled?
Assuming the project is worth doing, then why does this happen? I think in many cases it’s because we let our fears of the unknown get in the way.
Here are a few of the reason’s I’ve encountered why some of our potential clients get cold feet and their kiosk project and never get started.
Continue reading “What’s Your Excuse for Not Starting Your Kiosk Project?”
Does your system have too much downtime and you don’t even know it? Are your customers running away to your competitors without your knowledge?
The answer may be YES if your system experiences regular downtime and worst of all you may not even be aware of the extent of the damage until your reputation has been irreparably tarnished.
The term ‘downtime’ derives from when a system, combination of systems, or any application or service is unable to perform a desired operation. Downtime can be expected and scheduled, such as planned maintenance, or it can be an unintended interruption of service such as a server overload or device failure.
This article is intended to help broaden your thinking about the costs and types of system downtime.
Continue reading “System Downtime May Be Costing You More Than You Think”
Now that you’ve decided to dispense cash from your kiosk with a bill recycler I want to make you aware of the pitfalls to avoid. Dispensing cash can be invaluable for making change to your customers like a human cashier, but also introduces several new challenges which we’ll address in this article.
Most people familiar with bill acceptors think of a bill recycler as simply an add-on component which dispenses cash, but this is far from the case.
Dispensing bills greatly increases the complexity of the device and the logic required by your kiosk application in order to gracefully complete a cash transaction.
Don’t worry, all of these challenges can be overcome with careful planning and the reduced cashier expenses will be well worth the investment. Continue reading “5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Dispensing Cash from Your Kiosks”
Kiosk software is a security application specifically designed to transform a PC or tablet into a self-service kiosk. The kiosk software is also responsible for locking down your kiosks operating system to prevent malicious user tampering, which is why kiosk software is often referred to as “kiosk lockdown software.”
Some common features of kiosk software include:
Ensures that your kiosk application is always running
In most cases the kiosk operator will desire to deliver their content in the form of a website or native application running on their kiosk. An example of a native application for a kiosk running Microsoft Windows would be a .NET WPF application. For the sake of brevity, for the remainder of this article I’m going to refer to the website or native application running on your kiosk as “your kiosk application.”
What’s the difference between EMV compliance and PCI compliance? The short answer is they’re both guidelines for protecting cardholder data for the purpose preventing fraud, but they focus on different elements of the credit card transaction.
“To clarify it even further and more simply, PCI is about making sure the card data doesn’t get stolen and is secure in the first place and EMV is making sure if the data IS stolen that the content is rendered useless.” – CPI PCI and EMV: What’s the difference? Continue reading “EMV Compliance vs. PCI Compliance”
We’ve made it easy to start accepting cash and credit card payments from your self-service kiosk by using the KioskSimple kiosk SDK. Our kiosk SDK abstracts the complicated logic of several popular payment devices and greatly lowers the learning curve thereby saving you significant development costs.
Benefits of the KioskSimple kiosk SDK:
Continue reading “A Kiosk SDK Makes Accepting Payments Simple”
Bill jams are commonplace when your kiosk accepts cash payments. No matter how advanced the bill acceptor, there’s always that guy that inserts a bill covered in mud, or something worse, and gums up the device.
Rather than paying to rush out a support tech to clear the jam consider the option of running a backup bill acceptor. Continue reading “How to Deal With Bill Jams at Your Kiosk”
Have you ever been using a self-service kiosk and thought to yourself “that’s obviously not right?” Anyone who uses kiosks on a regular basis has at some point interacted with a kiosk that was less than professional. As a kiosk software company we’ve had the privilege of developing kiosk applications deployed across the US and I’ve compiled a list of signs of an amateur kiosk application so you can avoid these same mistakes.
1. The artwork on the kiosk screens looks like generic clipart or is inconsistent
Usually this happens because the kiosk designer doesn’t have access to a graphic artist or the client has their own ideas on what’s “acceptable” artwork. Fortunately we have an excellent graphic designer on staff but we’ve experienced the latter where clients will send us generic clipart for buttons and ask to have them put on the kiosk. We try our best to talk them out of this but sometimes to no avail. If you’ve seen our website KioskSimple.com you’ll notice we use a lot of hand drawn artwork that all meshes together nicely to give a consistent and professional theme with the occasional clipart thrown in for humor. Continue reading “8 Signs of an Amateur Touchscreen Kiosk Application”
This is my third and final article in a series titled “A Beginners Guide to Developing Kiosk Software.”
In this article I’m not even going to attempt to delve into the specifics of developing support for accepting payments because there is a huge variation between payment devices and their interfaces.
What I am going to cover is the decision making process you as a developer or business owner need to carefully step through when you decide to make your kiosk accept payments.
If you have any questions about a specific payment device please shoot me a message on one of my social media channels listed at the end of this article. Continue reading “Getting Started Developing Kiosk Software – Part 3 Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Payment Kiosks”
Does your kiosk application need to support accepting payments or possibly integrate with some elaborate biometric device? If so then we’ve got a solution that your developers will love. The KioskSimple Developer API is specifically designed to make it easier, simple even, to integrate popular kiosk devices with your kiosk application. We’ve provided code examples in .NET WPF C# for native Windows applications and JavaScript for websites to get your started quickly. Our developers have done all the heavy lifting by creating an abstracted interface (aka API) for popular kiosk devices so you don’t have to understand all of the ins and out of these intricate devices.
Here are just a few examples of the sort of kiosk devices our API supports:
Continue reading “Easily Integrate Popular Kiosk Devices with the KioskSimple Developer API”