Pathfinder develops touch screen kiosks in Adobe Air
Company:
Rotary International is a worldwide organization of more than 1.2 million business, professional, and community leaders. Rotarians provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world. Members who have donated a lifetime amount of $250,000 or more are inducted into the Arch C. Klumph Society, which honors them for their service and generosity.
Challenge:
Rotary needed two touch screen kiosks to replace and modernize the recognition structure for the Society. One would be a stationary version residing in their headquarters, and the other kiosk would be a mobile unit which could be shipped around the world for various events; both kiosks need to contain the same information. Running on a wide-screen touchscreen LCD monitor, both kiosks needed to allow users to browse by region or search by name for Rotarians in the Society. Users could drill down for each member of the Society to a page showing individual biographies, with photo, biographical text and video.
Solution:
Working with the touchscreen introduced some unique user interface challenges. Touch screens lack many of the familiar usage cues common to a computer with keyboard and mouse, such as hover and tabbing, and the size of clickable areas needed to be larger. By applying Pathfinder’s user experience design process, we were able to provide different cues, such as providing choice bubbles for different geographical locales, on each screen. These cues guided the user in making intuitive choices.
Pathfinder met the challenges of developing a highly interactive user experience and keeping the application up to date by developing in Adobe Flex. Flex is a programming environment which can produce Flash web-based applications and Adobe Air desktop applications from a single code base. In this case, the kiosk at the Rotary International headquarters utilized the Flash application since it was connected to a network and the Internet; the traveling kiosk utilized Air. Flex generates excellent-quality graphics which created a high-impact interface for the kiosk, even on the large resolution of the touchscreen. All of the data for the application can be easily updated by non-technical maintainers, with the resulting changes automatically updating the maps and other data-driven components.
Click on the image below to take a look at a short demo of the kiosk interface:
Contact the team that created the Touch Screen Kiosk application.