SEI Meetings & Incentives

Touchscreen Kiosk Application

Creative Lead and Digital Producer: Martin Manuel

Opportunity
SEI developed an end-to-end fulfillment model to provide corporations with incentive travel solutions. Each travel program includes logistics, travel, hospitality, events and promotional materials for a large group. One feature is an interactive touchscreen kiosk to greet guests at the hotel. The kiosk allows guests to review flight itineraries, daily agendas, rental car pairing, gala table assignments, etc. The kiosk remains at the hotel during the group's stay and provides up-to-date information from SEI's primary database.

Discovery
SEI originally developed the kiosk using HTML to display in a browser. In 2009, SEI wanted to update the kiosk to a Flash-based application to enhance the overall experience. The Flash-based kiosk is to be populated dynamically from SEI's database without being directly connected to the secure data source. Additionally, the kiosk needed to be updated easily with a new facade to be consistent with each program's unique theme. After reviewing SEI's HTML-based kiosk and mapping the architecture, additional interface and usability updates were recommended and approved by SEI.

Solution
Drawing on experience producing dynamic Flash micro sites for SEI, we circumvented SEI's security protocol by developing an XML gateway, whereby the database would populate the XML, which was then imported into Flash. The touchscreen did not require a direct connection to the database but still provided users with dynamic real-time data.

Each page of the application delivered unique information to the user. As such, a unique interface was designed around each page's core function. However, we reduced the common interface components to a small set of symbols within Flash to simplify the deployment of each new facade. The layout grid for the application remains the same from program to program, but the color palette, graphics and animations are easily updated

Result
Since delivery of the application in 2009, SEI has successfully utilized the hospitality touchscreen application for numerous travel programs for clients including T-Mobile and Farm Bureau.



Here, you can see the scale of the application via this system flowchart. Also, this deployment has been skinned for a different travel program.

Click for a larger view.