Self-registration kiosks... always a bad idea but never more than today!

I've never liked self-registration kiosks as a solution for events because they are slow, cumbersome and inaccurate.

First, I feel the need to clarify exactly what I mean by a "self-registration kiosk". I specifically mean a kiosk where someone who hasn't registered can arrive onsite and go to an unmanned computer to register themselves for the event and get their badge. I am not talking about someone who is already registered being able to scan a barcode and print their own badge at a badge printing kiosk onsite - those types of kiosks are awesome and work brilliantly.

How do I know that self-registration kiosks are bad? Well, some years ago, a colleague and I ended up in the most perfect real-world test possible when we were attending an event in Paris. We had nothing at all to do with the event other than being attendees.

We arrived onsite and quickly saw a long room with registration points on both sides of the event. Both of us had already registered for the event but we quickly saw that there were both self-registration kiosks and manned registration points available so we decided to conduct an experiment. I joined the relatively short line of people waiting to use a self-registration kiosk and my colleague joined the two or three times longer queue for a manned registration point.

You can already predict that my colleague who went to the manned registration point got his badge considerably quicker than me, despite him joining a much longer queue.

I couldn't see anything inherently wrong with the self-registration process, so why was this?

The interesting bit here is that humans are not naturally good at figuring out a new system on the fly. If you've ever watched someone who doesn't do it regularly trying to purchase a train ticket from an automated machine you will know what I mean. It takes longer than it should for someone to figure out what needs to be clicked/pressed/selected and what the next steps are. Self-registration is the same but worse.

This speed issue can also cause a problem with accuracy which may sound odd but again, as humans, we generally don't like to inconvenience other people, which is exactly why we hold doors even in access-controlled environments when we shouldn't. The same is true when we're conscious that we have a line of people behind us also waiting to register; we rush through the process which leads to inaccurate data being inputted. Ask anyone who is involved in event registration, many people can't even type their own names or email addresses so anything else is anyone's guess!

There is however a bigger elephant in this particular room. When my colleague and I experienced this situation, it was the early 2000s before the ubiquity of smart devices. These days, most of your attendees will be carrying a device that will allow them to go to an online URL and register without inconveniencing anyone else and their device may well already have a number of the answers to standard questions auto filled.

Why go to the effort and cost of installing self registration kiosks when every delegate has their own 'self reg kiosk' in the palm of their hand (and one they already know how to use).

The way our systems work means that if someone registers online, whilst standing in the reg area and the venue's internet connection is ok then the badge can be printed within a fraction of a second.

So, my advice would be to ditch the self reg kiosks, keep your online reg platform open for the duration and make sure your delegates know this. It's quicker for the delegate, cheaper for you and creates a much smoother registration process.