Running a Self-Service Kiosk

What a kiosk is, and what it needs

A kiosk is the Dines for Venues app turned into a customer-facing screen. The customer picks their own items and pays on the card reader. Nobody behind the counter touches the order.

A kiosk cannot trade until all of these are true:

• The device is an iPad. No other device is offered the setting.

• Dines has switched the kiosk on for your venue. It is off until we do.

• A card reader is paired with that iPad. The kiosk has no other way to take money. Only an order with nothing to pay can finish without one.

• Your till is on the payment flow the kiosk needs. That is ours to set, alongside switching the kiosk on, and the setting stays hidden until it is.

Moving the iPad into the kiosk, and back again, is a separate job. It is covered in Switch an iPad Between EPOS and Kiosk Mode. This article starts once the kiosk is up.

The opening screen

A kiosk at rest shows your venue photos, and cycles them where you have loaded more than one. One photo sits still. No photos means nothing behind the button at all. One large Place Order button sits across the lower third of the screen.

Under that button is a line of text. It is built from three parts, separated by dots: the time, the date, and the name of the serving point that iPad is set to. A venue that has set no serving point gets the time and the date only. The third part is your own name for the place the orders belong to, so it reads differently at every venue.

What the customer does

1. Place Order. The customer taps it. The menu opens.

2. Choose items. Categories run down one side. Items sit three to a row, with a name, a price and a photo. An item with no photo, or one whose photo will not load, gets a plain symbol for its item type instead. The category heading stays pinned to the top while the customer scrolls.

3. Read the detail, where there is any. A tap opens the item panel when that item carries a description, an allergen or a dietary label. An item with none of those, and no choices to make, drops into the basket on the first tap.

4. Check the basket. The basket sits beside the menu and adds up as the customer goes. A label at the top of it reads Swipe Left/Right on Items to Edit.

5. Pay. The button under the basket reads Pay Now. It is grey and dead until the basket has something in it. Venues that assign takeaway orders get two buttons instead, Eat In and Takeaway.

6. Confirm the order. A panel lists what was ordered. It carries Add More Items and a pay button naming the total. Lines cannot be changed or removed on this panel.

7. Present the card. The screen asks the customer to pay. The reader takes it. A kiosk never asks for a tip, whatever the tipping setting on that iPad says.

8. Take the number. The confirmation screen shows Ticket Number: and the number. Beside it is a QR code that opens that order online.

A declined card gets a panel headed Payment Failed. It carries one button, Review Order. That returns the customer to their order. Nothing is lost.

What reaches the kiosk menu

A kiosk does not show your whole menu. It builds its own list first.

Items that run out behave differently. An item marked unavailable, or out of stock, stays on the screen and is dimmed. That is not the same as an item switched off on your menu, which never reaches the kiosk at all. Separately from the dimming, a label can sit across the tile. Only one label shows at a time, and a sales-limit count wins over the others.

Read the dimming, not the label. A tile that is not dimmed is one the customer can still buy, whatever its label says. A dimmed tile cannot be bought, even where its label is a count.

An item can sell out while a customer is choosing. When the kiosk next reloads its menu, that item is taken out of their basket. Nothing tells the customer it has gone.

What a customer cannot do on the kiosk

Some things that exist elsewhere on Dines are not on the kiosk screen. Know them before a customer asks a member of staff for one. The gap that catches venues out is the first one in this table. A customer with an allergy cannot narrow the menu down themselves on a kiosk, the way they can on a phone. They have to open items one at a time, or ask.

Between one customer and the next

A kiosk clears itself in two ways. Both matter when you decide where to stand.

• Five minutes untouched on the menu screen. The kiosk empties the basket and returns to the opening screen. Every touch starts the five minutes again.

• Fifteen seconds on the confirmation screen. It counts down on screen and closes itself. A Next Customer button closes it sooner. Those fifteen seconds are fixed. They are not the auto-dismiss delay you can set for a till.

The kiosk also sends the order to print as the confirmation screen opens. A printer that fails puts its error on the kiosk screen, in front of whoever is standing at it. Nothing stops the fifteen seconds while that error is up, so it can come and go with nobody behind the counter seeing it. Test a print before you open.

Taking a kiosk out of service

A kiosk goes back to being a till from the opening screen, not from the menu. The tap area is a rectangle in the top right corner, roughly a sixth of the screen wide. Nothing on it tells you it is a way out.

1. Get the kiosk back to its opening screen. Finish or clear whatever is on it first.

2. Tap the top right corner five times.

3. The app restarts on the till.

Nothing asks for a PIN or a passcode at that point. Anyone who knows about the corner can take your kiosk to a live till, with menus, payments, refunds and reports on it. Treat an unwatched kiosk the way you treat an unlocked till. Keep it in sight, or keep it in reach.

The Partner Dashboard does not report which mode a device is in. You cannot confirm from a desk that a kiosk went back to being a till. Look at the iPad: a tab bar means the till, cycling photos mean the kiosk.

If the app does not restart, get in touch before you do anything else to that iPad. Take one out of service the day before you need it, not on the morning you do.

Test one order before you open

Run one order through the kiosk yourself, all the way to the confirmation screen. It is the only way to see the whole path on your own menu, with your own reader.

• Is the reader paired and awake? A kiosk that cannot find a reader opens the card reader screen at the customer. An iPad set to skip the paired-reader check shows no such screen. No card reader screen is therefore not proof of a paired reader. Check the reader itself.

• Do your venue photos show on the opening screen? A venue with none loaded gets nothing behind the Place Order button.

• Does the ticket print, and is it the right ticket?

• Does your venue make staff log in with a PIN before taking payment? Check what the kiosk does at the pay step. It runs the same pay path as the till, and a PIN box in front of a customer stops the order dead.

• Is the serving point on the opening screen the one those orders should belong to?

• Does the menu on screen match the menu you meant to sell? Anything without a price will not be there.