Paper Plus BookFinder kiosk

Greatly challenging both in terms of interface and functionality, the Paper Plus BookFinder kiosk was a project we approached with relish.

Paper Plus BookFinder kiosk

BookFinder kiosk and receipt printer at Paper Plus, Sylvia Park

Background

Paper Plus is a well known retail brand within the Books and Stationery industry in New Zealand. In mid-2007 the company launched a number of innovative changes, with the goals of demonstrating market leadership, gaining attention in a competitive market and positioning Paper Plus as a lifestyle choice in books, stationery, cards and paper products, and associated gifts.

The new flagship location at Sylvia Park is the beginning of the new look and feel and a more customer-centric model. Part of this model involved providing customers with an interactive BookFinder Kiosk.

Brief

The brief was to provide a kiosk which would allow customers to search for a book, check if it is in stock at the store, view the current price, read a detailed description and get a print-out of the particulars of a book or a search.

The design of the touchscreen interface was of prime importance: it needed to provide an easy-to-use touchscreen keyboard, clear and quick search responses, and full book details and cover pictures, while reflecting the new look and feel of the brand. The interface needed to provide all the expected
search filtering within an instantly understandable and easily navigated touchscreen interface.

Digital signage was required for the times while the kiosk was not in use. This ‘attract loop’ would be updated with new reviews from the Paper Plus
website.

Solution

Working with AdvanceRetail Technology, New Zealand’s leading POS software vendor and Paper Plus’ supplier, we built a backend that integrates into the existing the Paper Plus POS system, checking for price and stock status in real time and displaying this information onscreen.

The kiosk uses a subset of the Nielsen BookData database that is pertinent to New Zealand and receives overnight updates to the database via FTP to keep it current. The search engine uses an open source text search product called Lucene.net which indexes over 990,000 books every day. The search provides instant results as you type, searching the title, author, subject and ISBN number fields, automatically performing word-stemming and widening the search* when necessary. Book details displayed include cover art, jacket notes, edition and publisher.

We designed the interface for a 17" screen to give plenty of room for keyboards and book information displays. The interface is a seamless search tool. The keyboard, scrollers, filter buttons, and results displays are gathered in easily accessible panels which slide smoothly on and off screen as necessary.

Text is entered using a visually-responsive on-screen keyboard. The instant feedback the user receives is key to making what could be a complex interface very intuitive - the user understands exactly what the kiosk is supposed to do the moment the first key is touched

A print-out of search results or the details of a book can be generated at any time. The book details print-out includes the unique barcode for the book which is particularly useful for placing advance orders for a book that is not in stock at the time. A customer can take a print-out to the counter and have the barcode scanned to place an order for the book.

Results

The kiosk at Sylvia Park has been extremely popular from the first week of use. Shop managers report that customers find it easy to use the kiosk and require little if any help. The design of the interface fits in well with the branding of the new store, and supports the new emphasis on customer experience.

* Stemming & Auto Widening

Stemming: This treats variants of a word as the same word, so when you search for "Swim" you’ll get results containing the words Swim, Swims, Swimmer, Swimming and more.

Auto Widening: When a search returns no results, we search for a less exact match. When you type in "tolk" we first search for the "tolk" and variants of tolk, such as tolks (stemming), then if this returns no results we search for 5 letter words starting with tolk, tolka, tolkb, etc. If we still have no results we search for any words starting with tolk, such as tolkien or tolkin.