Digital signage and kiosks at first glimpse appears to be entirely different devices.
The kiosk is basically an interactive device that offers a service or a product, while digital signage helps to keep customers engaged with the use of HD displays to deliver multimedia content that includes menus, entertainment, news, weather, educational information.
There are lot of uses of digital signage and kiosks, and some companies are even uniting digital signage with kiosks.
Do you think this can form the ideal partnership?
Experts believes that digital signage can provide surplus brand awareness and information when incorporated into a kiosk.Kiosks having eye catching loops can be more useful to the end user with the addition of brand awareness capability.
Laura Miller, director of marketing for KioWarementions said that “digital signage offers clarity to the true purpose of a kiosk.”
What Do Digital Signage Offers?
- Branding
- Messaging
- Communication to attract users to the kiosk or
Kiosk software can also perform many of these tasks, with the support of secondary monitor.
For Instance, A LCD screen can be placed on top of a ticketing kiosk to advertise particular games for sale at the kiosk in the future. It can help to advertise local restaurants in the area.
You can find a beautiful example of combination of these technologies at The Field Museum in Chicago. They use ticketing kiosks integrated with digital signage. Users use the kiosk to buy tickets and look up information about upcoming events, while the digital signage displayed advertisements and messages about new exhibits and events. The kiosk provided the main service while the digital signage offers additional information.
It make use of ticketing kiosks to advertise particular games for sale at the kiosk in the future.However, there are some challenges when we think of combining the two technologies:-
The Challenges
- If the Digital signage is non-interactive it might confuse users, if it is paired with an interactive kiosk, users will rarely look at an expensive screen that is not touch enabled.
- Paul Stahl, director of government sales at DynaTouch believes, on the other hand, that kiosks work best when paired with a non-interactive kiosk. He thinks kiosks are primary means to provide one-on-one interaction and digital signage is designed to provide one-to-many.
With the help of touch screens with One-To-One applications on a digital signage application that turns it into a kiosk, and on some level Digital Signage needs to enrich and entice users and not slow-down to be choked back to a one-to-one interaction, Stahl said.
In other words, if you own a digital signage display, single individual can influence the wider reach that digital signage generally is used for in the first place and takeover to One-To-Many paradigm of digital signage.
You are required to ensure that digital signage is truly enhancing the kiosks rather than distracting from its basic purpose.You also need to make sure that the digital signage is actually enhancing the kiosk rather than diverting from its primary purpose.
If the digital signage somehow didn’t allow someone from using the kiosk, it has a conniving effect rather than crafting helpful relationship with the kiosk. Stahl says, “If an individual buy tickets on the kiosk and perform five different things before other can get a turn on the kiosk, then it can’t be counted as an enhancement.
It is very essential to keep in mind the various abilities and limitations of kiosks and digital signage.
Digital signage offer content, but it must have worthy software and network infrastructure in order to keep that content updated regularly.Kiosks very well know how to handle transactional security.
Digital Signage is now becoming smart and interactive, so they need to catch up on security/data handling, especially when it comes to external devices/input devices and other supported activities or transactional support.This includes all the support for dispensing, printing, and scanning.
The same principles of good partnerships apply to digital signage and kiosks.
The main aim of both should be the same and that is to enhance customer experience. If they will go in opposite directions, then the partnership will definitely fail.
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