Shop online, if you can actually get online.
This past weekend found me digging around Home Depot for various items including patio furniture. I found a couple of chairs and a table, but the table did not have a price tag. Enter the kiosk you see, located conveniently 10 feet from the table. I figured, with that big “Shop Online” sign on the front, that I could take the SKU number and get a price.
Instead of talking only about what went wrong, I have three simple solutions that can completely change this kiosk:
The monitor was surrounded by store tchotchkes, including a staple gun and cleaning supplies.
The very first impression is whether this is customer-facing. Clean it up. Get rid of all the employee items, leaving only the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse. These items should be clean and free from dust and dirt (I’m going to assume the employee could clean it, not leave the cleaning supplies for the customer to use…). I’m sure the kiosk has network connectivity, making it an employee workstation, but this is no excuse for the clutter and unattractiveness. This was not built for the employee.
The screen was showing the default Windows XP screensaver.
The screensaver is the first thing a customer sees when approaching the monitor. Make it inviting. If you don’t have the store logo, use one of the scenic-photo-montage screensavers that comes with the operating system, anything other than the default XP screen.
I hit a key on the keyboard and up popped the Windows XP login screen.
Strike three. At this point, there is no way a customer will go further with this.
It would take no more than 15 minutes for an employee to remedy these issues, ensuring that every customer who walked toward this kiosk would actually use it.
When the login window popped up, I tried a halfhearted login, “homedepot,” and was met with denial. I walked away from the kiosk, and Home Depot lost my business that day.
And all because their customer kiosk didn’t look like a customer kiosk.
So my first reaction was, “Paul, stop messing around at an employee work station!”
That’s a kiosk???
My second reaction, “It only took you 15 minutes to get someone useful at a Home Depot?”
When I showed my wife this kiosk, she said to me, “Is that for you? It looks like an employee workstation.” Had there been no giant ‘Shop Online’ sign, I would have agreed.
Aye, there’s the rub: No human help + bad kiosk = bad experience.
Of course I messed with it. I’m a (wannabe) computer geek. I wonder what I would have done had the password worked. Now that would have been an interesting experience.