Museum kiosks are touchscreen tablets or all-in-one computers where visitors can learn more about an exhibit, navigate through your museum, and interact with special content experiences.
If you’re considering setting up kiosks, it’s important to know your options. What goals can you achieve with your kiosk? Which platform is best suited for your needs?
In this guide, we cover the top benefits, use cases, and features of museum kiosks to help inform your strategy. Keep reading for all the insights.
Main benefits of museum kiosks
Museum program managers and customer experience managers rely on kiosks to create scalable, editable content.
Here are the top benefits of this technology:
Easy to update and maintain
Traditional signs and labels need to be redesigned, printed, and mounted. But digital kiosks and labels can be updated in minutes and deployed to all devices instantly. This not only saves money, but it allows museum curators to use their kiosks for different purposes at different times.
Improve access to content
Museum kiosks also make your content a lot more accessible. You can provide transcripts of audio and video content for the hearing impaired and provide audio descriptions for the vision impaired. Museum kiosks can also offer content in several different languages (all without cluttering your space with physical displays).
Ensure that answers are always available
Docents might not always be available to answer visitor questions. Kiosks offer museum information, exhibit information, and other details around the clock so you can ensure that some form of support is always being provided.
Top use cases for museum kiosks
There are several different types of museum kiosks, and many of them can perform double duty (or triple duty). Whether through widgets or choose-your-own-adventure flows, kiosks often manage multiple use cases at once.
Digital labels
One of the most common use cases for museum kiosks are simple digital labels. Digital screens can clarify the origin of historical artifacts, tell the creation story behind a piece of artwork, or explain the science behind an installation.
Interactive content displays
Museum kiosks can also provide interactive experiences. Users can engage with the content that interests them most or follow a guided walkthrough. Imagine content maps, timelines, and flowcharts.
Visitor feedback
You can also use a kiosk to collect feedback from your visitors. You might create a short multiple-choice survey or ask for open-ended feedback on a certain exhibit or the museum as a whole. This is a great way to get visitor input while it’s fresh in their minds (instead of sending a survey by email after their visit).
Wayfinding
Whether with interactive elements or simple static maps, kiosks can also improve wayfinding. You can add several wayfinding kiosks throughout your museum to ensure that visitors can locate exhibits, restrooms, cafes, and other amenities.
Ticket purchases and add-on experiences
Museum kiosks can also be used to sell tickets, whether for entry to your museum or an additional experience. You can even sell memberships to visitors within your museum or allow them to enter their contact information to receive membership details by email or text.
Promotions
Do you have a special event coming up? Whether for a movie night, summer camp, or fundraising event, kiosk displays work great for spreading awareness. You can create static ads or generate email sign-ups.
Key features to look for in kiosk software
When purchasing museum kiosk software, consider vetting solutions for these key features. They’ll ensure that you’re getting the most out of your kiosk platform and that it can meet your needs for years to come.
Multilanguage
Check that your kiosk platform allows multilanguage content experiences. Users should be able to select their language and have the rest of the content automatically available in their language of choice. Make sure the platform supports the languages most commonly spoken by your visitors.
Multimedia
You’ll also want to offer multimedia content with your kiosks. It should support:
- Images
- Videos
- Text
- Audio
- Augmented reality
The sky should be the limit. Even if you don’t plan on creating AR experiences right away, it’s important that the platform offer this capability so you can do so in the future.
Content themes
Your digital content experience should be consistent and on-brand. With websites, content themes are the best way to manage this, and kiosks are no different. You should be able to choose from a variety of content themes and customize the theme to your branding. Then, when you launch new content, you can use your pre-existing design and layouts instead of having to design pages from scratch every time.
Interactivity
Your museum kiosks should be interactive. Users should be able to select the content they want to engage with, the formats that fit their needs, and their language preferences. Make sure that the platform you choose works well with touchscreen devices.
Accessibility
Your museum kiosk should also include accessibility features. For instance, if there’s written text, a user should be able to click an audio button to hear it read aloud. Make sure your platform offers voiceover and image descriptions.
Central management
You’ll want to manage content from one central location. Choose a cloud-enabled solution that lets you deploy content updates to the appropriate devices. So, if you update a map, it should be updated on all of the kiosks featuring that map.
Content analytics
When launching digital kiosks for your museum, you’ll also need to make sure that you’re collecting data on the success of your content.
You’ll want to collect:
- Top-performing content pages
- Worst-performing content pages
- Content completion and drop-offs
- Popular kiosk locations
You can use this data to inform all sorts of programming. You can discover what content your audience cares the most about and use that to plan not only kiosk content but physical installations as well.
Give visitors great content in accessible formats and you can’t go too far wrong.
Looking to create effective museum kiosks? Learn more about STQRY Kiosk.