Marketing kiosk

I wanted to help customers make more informed choices for their insurance coverage. Based on all the information available, choosing the best rainfall stations for their coverage wasn’t easy. The app in the marketing kiosk did not provide any additional value. The information it shared was available on our website in a similar format. The challenge is that privacy issues limit the data that can be shared before the customer has chosen their rainfall stations.

For this module, I developed the proposal and provided concepts and sketches to get approval to move forward with this update. This is a module for the marketing department’s iPad kiosk. As part of the technical communications team, I took over the user experience and development of the kiosk. It is built using the same methodologies that we use to build high-fidelity interactive prototypes.

My goal was to redesign the rainfall module to give visitors to our booth the ability to find rainfall stations close to them without revealing the actual location of the rainfall station. (Rainfall stations are hosted on private land and their location might be seen to be biased in favour of the host farms.) This could help them create more informed decisions about their coverage. For their coverage, farmers had to pick up to three rainfall stations.

I had been trying to understand how customers could reliably select rainfall data stations. Customer’s selection is based on a name that described a very large area – sometimes a township within a county. We know the GPS coordinates of the rainfall stations, so I determined we could calculate a straight-line distance between the station and the farm. By calculating the distance to each rainfall station, we could then order them by distance. Farmers could then remove rainfall stations that didn’t reflect what happens on their farm. This would help them find the three closest stations. By allowing them to eliminate any or all of the three and adding in the next three closest, customers could easily find ones that were best suited to their needs.

My proposal was well received, but further work was put on hold. A government partnership with industry was being discussed to change how data for this plan was collected. If the pilot project is unsuccessful, work on this module will continue.