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Council Kiosks
Kiosks are seen as the remedy for councils to reach the government target for implementation of the strategy for services to become electronically available by 2005.
Our experience shows that it's not as simple as that; there are kiosks and there are kiosks, and they are not all created equally.
Just ticking a box to say that kiosks are available with the council website and a few other features will not necessarily engage the public.
Usage and fulfillment of needs inevitably will become the next real issues. In fact the government have extended the strategy to include the aim of ensuring high usage levels.
Useful services going into the back office functions are required and links to supportive ancillary services, even if these are located on external sites are needed.
For example in Sheffield we are linking to both the Jobcentre Plus vacancy database and the National Benefits solution for pre-population of repetitive tasks on council and government forms, as well as benefit and housing application processing.
All of which are public accessible through our kiosks.
XML and web services are built into our
interfaces to handshake with council websites and back office
services.
Our kiosks are very different from others as we manipulate the websites adding assistive elements that make them far simpler and quicker to use.
This simplicity is proven in our constant five-year operational service resulting in consistent high usage. High usage is due to moderating the website activity with our unique methods towards greater simplicity, this fact alone means our kiosks are very different from the others and ensures user engagement and successful operation of a public access service.
Simplicity of the complexity of Websites themselves is our strategy the kiosk is just the container. |
