Business school video call kiosks

The idea was as follows:

• Students would approach the kiosk and click on the call button;
• the page would redirect to the video calling service provided by urLive;
• when the call ended, the student would go on about their day.

Simple, right? Wrong. How do we get back to the kiosk page after the call? That was the question. The people at urLive saved the day.

Our use case stood out to them as having the potential take their offering in a whole new direction. The owner reached out to us (to our videographer) and we were on a call with him and someone from the development team soon after. We proposed a feature where the service could redirect to a web page after the call was ended. As it turns out, they were already working on a similar idea and were close to moving it into production. They hurried up their process and pushed out a new release and our problem was solved. We could now redirect back to the kiosk page after the call, thanks to a setting in the service configuration.

In the course of building out the page, we came up with another scenario--this time it was something within our reach. What if a student didn't want to stand in the very public building atrium, (think lobby,) and ask a question? I posed this question to our videographer and we came up with the idea to add a QR code that would send users to a mobile version of the kiosk page on their smartphone. That way, they could go to the page and walk away to make the call in a private space, or take the page with them to make the call later. The best part--it's all just one page! Thanks to responsive design, the same kiosk page on the iPad is displayed differently on a mobile device, with the QR code replaced by building information.