Journal
Where visitors stall at a self-service kiosk
The kiosk stood to the left of the reception hatch, facing the glass doors. A printed card taped to the bezel said ‘Scan IC / passport’. Between 8.15 and 10.40 we watched twenty-two people try to print a visitor pass without a clerk.
Eight of them never reached the scan. They stood in front of the screen, looked at the hatch, and waited to be noticed. The kiosk was live. The habit in that lobby was still to catch someone’s eye.
Of the fourteen who touched the screen, five stalled on the company field. The list offered factory names from the estate but not the contractor firms that actually send drivers. People typed anyway, hit a red outline, and turned to the hatch with the sentence ‘It does not have us’.
Three stalled on language. The first screen offered English only. A driver asked, in Malay, whether the machine could switch. The clerk reached over and finished the pass by hand.
Two finished the flow and then did not take the pass. The printer sat on a shelf behind the hatch. The kiosk’s last screen said ‘Please collect’. Collect from where was a local fact, not a line of text.
We do not treat these as a single ‘adoption problem’. They are four different stalls: a floor habit, a missing firm name, a language switch, and a printer that lives in the wrong place. A visit analysis writes them down separately so the host can give each one to a different owner.
If you run a similar kiosk, stand where the visitor stands for one morning before you order a new machine. The stalls are usually already audible.