Curiosity Station Kiosks
October 15th, 2006
Skills: Flash 8, ActionScript 2, ColdFusion, SQL Server, XML, HTML, CSS
Total Number of Kiosks: 9
Curiosity Stations are a chance for visitors to take the National Zoo home with them. The kiosks allow visitors to enter their name, email address and select Asia Trail topics of interest to explore in depth at home.
Two banks of Curiosity Station kiosks are located in high-traffic areas: one by the indoor Giant Panda viewing, the other by the outdoor Sloth Bear viewing. Given their prominent locations at the exits of the Asia Trail, the exhibit experience was designed to be quick, as a lengthy kiosk experience could not and should not compete with the two flagship species.
The kiosks are a three-part experience.
First, the Flash-based kiosks receive random lists of topics of interest from dynamically generated XML feeds via ColdFusion, Internet Information Server and SQL Server. Visitor information, including name, selected topics and visitation tracking information, are passed back to the Asia Trail server on the Smithsonian-wide exhibits network. All information except email addresses is logged to the database.
Next, ColdFusion generates and sends a custom email, with both an HTML and text-only version, to the visitor with a link to a personalized Web site.
Lastly, users explore their personalized Web site that contains in-depth answers to their topics of interest. All page views are tracked to help the Zoo understand how the exhibit is utilized.
The in-park kiosk experience takes about 45 seconds. The at-home, Web piece is designed to be a leisurely experience.
My role in the exhibit included information architecture design, Flash and ActionScript development, ColdFusion development, database design, and HTML/CSS coding for the email and Web site.
I also specified the touch screen, LCD, computer and VGA/Serial via Cat5 hardware for the mixed indoor/outdoor kiosks. See my paper on building outdoor multimedia exhibits for details.
