Power protection for kiosks

If you read my last post, I ranted about kiosks that are not working. Sometimes that is due to hardware failures, and sometimes those failures are not the fault of the hardware provider. Any time you have electronics plugged into A/C outlets there is a risk of lightening strikes, power surges, brown outs, and more commonly: dirty power. All of these electrical issues can cause hardware to fail, or act abnormally, or even cause the operating system or software to have "issues".





Now a customer who has deployed these kiosks in their retail store, or office building etc. has probably contracted with a software developer and a separate hardware provider. They may have even used another company for networking, installation or internet access. So there are a lot of people to point fingers at when things go wrong. Sometimes it is better to use a total kiosk integrator (see my company as an example) who can provide software, hardware, & installation so that the customer only has one butt to kick when things go awry. And that integrator will often know what element is causing the problem, and just fix it rather than start the finger pointing game. But a situation like "dirty power" or "line noise" can be hard to troubleshoot, and can make things happen that are unexplainable without a lot of investigation.





This is why it is often a prudent investment to use an A/C line conditioner to prevent this right up front no matter if you are the integrator or the customer that is buying the kiosk. A small investment (around $150-$175 per unit for a good one) will keep your kiosk from having downtime, possibly loosing data or at least loosing opportunities when a customer is ready to interact. That could be hundreds or thousands of dollars lost and your reputation tarnished. The small investment makes your total cost of ownership (TOC) lower because over the life of your kiosk deployment you will make fewer service calls out in the field, have fewer wasted hours trying to troubleshoot, and fewer wasted hours shooting emails back and forth trying to determine what went wrong. Thats hard to see up front when you are planning and budgeting for a deployment but I hope you will think of this now and save yourself, your partners and your customers a lot of grief.





We are, after all, talking about computer hardware / software in an public space, often un-manned or managed. There are enough ways for it to fail like vandalism or sabatoge, that you have a hard time fighting... why leave open a unprotected A/C line (which you can defend) and have that be the cause of failure? Also, if you are using a cabled ethernet connection, this is another source of danger as sometimes the surges come across the network or phone lines and not the A/C lines. Protect those points of entry too. I'm not talking about a simple power surge protector here, I'm talking about a quality line conditioner which will prevent line noise or dirty electric. And they will often have a surge protector built in as well.





As an example, our firm has a client who uses kiosks in a mobile marketing campaign for many large brands. They have non-IT savy staff members traveling all over north America setting up for consumer facing events. One day a field team calls and states that the kiosk has failed. Three quarters of the screen are black, and the software can be seen only on one quadrant. Well, there were lots of ideas why this would happen, such as high heat since it was outdoors in a parking lot under a tent. But the temperatures were well within tested temperatures and should not have cause it to fail. We had our onsite warranty team go and replace the unit. When the unit was tested later, it worked just fine, even outside in the sun. We later found that they were running the power to the computer kiosk from a generator. Generators are great mobile power sources but often produce dirty electric sinewaves. A line conditioner was the fix.





There are many available from companies such as tripp lite, APC, ESP and many more. We like the guys at ESP whose product is being integrated more and more in the kiosk industry. Often as an option by hardware fabricators. Their products are inside of many large NCR ATM machines, behind a lot of large corporate copiers and expensive electronics. This stuff works great, we even use it to protect our phone system. Our company sells these as an option for new kiosks and can provide them with leased or rented kiosks too. It just makes sense. Now they can be a bit big, so hiding them will take a few more inches than a surge protector, but its worth the protection and the uptime you will not ever think about. Peace of mind? Or prudent planning? As long as you protect your investment and your reputation, I think you're one smart kiosk integrator!

Disappointing Kiosks

You've probably seen a kiosk that has an error message on screen or even a kiosk that has a blank screen. A non functioning kiosk is worse than no kiosk at all. It undermines the consumer's trust in a reliable source of content or their trust in the capabilities of the provider. Sure, we all pretty much understand that computers are not perfect and will need some maintenance from time to time, and that not every company has world class IT support teams. But you can implement systems that will alert your team when something goes awry, or reboots itself in attempts to clear the problem. Sadly, many companies that implement kiosks don't want to consider these possibilities, or they are the first thing in the budget that gets "nixed" when trying to make the numbers work. Ongoing maintenance and support are important considerations. Onsite warranty from hardware manufacturers combined with good software infrastructure and a plan... are the basics of maximizing uptime.



But one thing that is perhaps even worse than a non functioning kiosk is a kiosk that is well designed, has good signage, has a good purpose, and then fails to deliver on it's promise. I recently saw an example of this at the Cincinnati Airport (CVG). As you enter the baggage claim area there are two large stations of three kiosks each, that promise the visitor hotel information and courtesy phones. When you approach the screen, you see three links: Hotel Courtesy Phone, Visitor Information and Kiosk / Airport advertising information. Obviously, this was put together by whomever has a lock on airport advertising, otherwise why would you give that last topic such importance for a visitor kiosk? When you click on Hotel Courtesy Phone you get a page with a bunch of logos of local hotels and basic information on them. If you click a button, it promises to call that hotel for you so you can book a room. The phone dialing did not work.



So I tried the Visitor information in hopes of finding out what to do around town, where to eat, shop, and perhaps some quick local history. Nope, the page loaded with a simple but terrible message: "Content coming soon". I can tell you that these kiosks had already been deployed for months, and still there was no content. I was disappointed. Not happy, not delighted, not impressed, I was let down by the content provider, not the hardware or operating system. It was simply a lazy provider of content that did not live up to their promise to the consumer.


I wanted to voice my dis-satisfaction so I clicked the third link to learn about airport advertising and find the company responsible for the content. But guess what, I found the same "Content coming soon" message on this screen. So even if I wanted to add my hotel to the list, or find out how to help this sad excuse for a content provider... I could not. I had to shake my head and let out a slight chuckle that can only come from someone in the business. I should sit nearby and see how many other visitors come away from the kiosks with a positive experience. I'm sure I'd be sitting for many hours. Turns out the kiosks are provided by cvg-ads.com, which I looked up on my Blackberry browser. The site was empty too. Ugh. However, I just checked it again and it forwards to coreyairportservices.net which is also light in actual content, and overly complex in design of the flash tool to show available ads. They will show rate cards for some items, but not the kiosks. They do digital signage and promotions within the CVG airport. It appears that this is their first airport market.





The kiosk hardware is nice enough, these are Slabb brand kiosk enclosures, with touch screen and phone handsets. I even liked how the power cords were nicely covered where they run into the wall and plugged into a power source in a room behind the wall. Nicely done! So I can find no fault in the hardware installation, no fault in the operating system and the screen design was even decent. But the most basic element, the content was limited or missing. The opportunity was there, and they missed it. How many people tried to get some value from these kiosks during their first months of deployment and were also disappointed? Those visitors will likely never walk up to those kiosks again. You get one chance to make a first impression and you had better not mess it up. A returning guest at your kiosk will cut you a break when you have a temporary hardware / software failure, but that's because they already like the product you deliver which is "the content". A first time guest will not give you any slack and will not likely return.