Collecting information from visitors

Kiosk Pro can be used to capture information, including name, email, and other contact information, from visitors.

Creating a form for online use

There are a number of options for developing web-based forms to collect data that can be shown in Kiosk Pro. By design, these options are hosted online and require an internet connection at each kiosk to run successfully.

When choosing a web form provider, you should evaluate their form configuration interface and options, pricing, and how they allow you to export and/or back-up your resulting data.

Survey Tool or Form Builder

If you need a form or survey that can easily be customized, there are a number of software companies that specialize in creating online surveys or forms that can be run in Kiosk Pro. Popular options include:

Mailing List Sign-up

If you need a sign-up form that saves a visitor's contact information to an online database, many email marketing companies have free templates or sign-up forms that you can customize and then run in Kiosk Pro. If your company currently uses email marketing and/or a CRM (customer records management) system, they may have a web interface like this. Popular providers in this space include:

Creating a form for offline use

If you need a form to collect data that works offline, our Basic, Plus and Enterprise versions include JavaScript API functions that allow you to save visitor form data to a locally stored spreadsheet (.csv) file in Kiosk Pro's Documents folder.

More information about how this works, including documentation and sample code, can be found here. If you need help putting this together, we do offer custom HTML development in-house at an hourly rate and are happy to discuss a quote for your project.

Simplifying data entry

If you are creating your own form, using the correct tags in your input fields can make entering form data significantly faster and easier for your visitors and that can mean better response rates for your kiosks.

iOS/iPadOS supports standard HTML 5 autocorrect and autocapitalize tags on input fields to help define when it should attempt to help users fill in a form field. In most kiosk applications, it is preferable to turn auto-correct off, especially in fields with non-standard input (like name, for example) as in: <input type="text" autocorrect="off"></input>

The autocapitalize tag has several options:

'none' - no words are automatically capitalized, although the shift option remains available.
'sentences' - capitalizes the first letter of each sentence automatically.
'words' - capitalizes the first letter of each word automatically.
'characters' - capitalize all characters automatically (useful for state abbreviations).
'off' and 'on' - while these both work (as 'none' or 'sentences', respectively) in current versions of iOS, they are deprecated.

For fields accepting numerical input like a zip code, you can use the pattern tag to trigger the numeric keyboard on focus: <input type="text" pattern="[0-9]*"></input>. While less semantically correct in some cases, you can also use <input type="tel"></input> to trigger the numeric keyboard.

For fields with <input type="url"></input>, the keyboard will include a '.com' button in the bottom row. For fields with <input type="email"></input>, the keyboard will include an '@' symbol button in the bottom row.

If you don't have control of the form code itself, you can enable or disable "Auto-Capitalization', 'Auto-Correction' and 'Check Spelling' in the iPad settings under General > Keyboard.

If your kiosk content features forms with a large number of fields, you may consider paring an external keyboard to your kiosk to make text entry easier and more accurate. Note that Kiosk Pro is unable to determine when input is being entered through an external keyboard and is unable to automatically pause the idle timer for this type of input. We currently recommend setting a longer idle time out period if using an external keyboard