Looking at the other posts here, I see lots of really "user friendly" designs.
I took a slightly different tack in my design - I didn't think that people had trouble using kiosks because they didn't understand how the task they tried to accomplish corresponded to the interface, they just failed because the kiosk interface was too dumb. So, the first thing I'd do is stick a keyboard on the kiosk and forget about the idea of having a "real-world" video rental store metaphor. In my sketches, I clearly divided two tasks: searching for a PARTICULAR movie, and trying to get a movie suggestion without knowing a title/actor/etc. The kiosk's usability comes from people's familiarity with computer searching and filtering. I also made the buttons really big and obvious so that a touchscreen would be usable.
Another thing I think is important is that sorting dynamically show the results. That way you can use a free-form text box without users wondering "am I typing the right thing to get the results I want?". The computer system would be responsible for parsing the users' input in whatever form it comes. A system that works like this already is Google Maps; you can type an address in pretty much any format and it'll understand what you meant. Very powerful and very easy to use.
Bryan Jacobs
I took a slightly different tack in my design - I didn't think that people had trouble using kiosks because they didn't understand how the task they tried to accomplish corresponded to the interface, they just failed because the kiosk interface was too dumb. So, the first thing I'd do is stick a keyboard on the kiosk and forget about the idea of having a "real-world" video rental store metaphor. In my sketches, I clearly divided two tasks: searching for a PARTICULAR movie, and trying to get a movie suggestion without knowing a title/actor/etc. The kiosk's usability comes from people's familiarity with computer searching and filtering. I also made the buttons really big and obvious so that a touchscreen would be usable.
Another thing I think is important is that sorting dynamically show the results. That way you can use a free-form text box without users wondering "am I typing the right thing to get the results I want?". The computer system would be responsible for parsing the users' input in whatever form it comes. A system that works like this already is Google Maps; you can type an address in pretty much any format and it'll understand what you meant. Very powerful and very easy to use.
Bryan Jacobs
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