An interactive touchscreen kiosk engaging millions of shoppers worldwide

Yeti partnered closely with Westfield Labs’ executive team to tackle a bold series of initiatives—among them, transforming the traditional, outdated mall directory into an intuitive, interactive experience. Our aim was to revolutionize how shoppers navigate their environment, ensuring they could find their way with ease, engage more deeply with the mall’s offerings, and ultimately enjoy a more seamless, satisfying visit.

The Challenge

After stepping into an interactive kiosk project already underway, Yeti found itself facing a significant challenge: a looming launch tied to a major mall’s grand opening, set to arrive in just a few short months. At a glance, meeting this tight timeline seemed nearly impossible - but the stakes were high. Delivering on this initial milestone would unlock a wider roadmap of future kiosks across Westfield’s portfolio—each with its own unique layouts, feature requests, and evolving needs. To achieve this, we had to not only meet an aggressive schedule but also develop a robust, future-ready solution that could seamlessly scale and adapt to every new rollout on the horizon. Moving forward meant answering the question:‍

How can we develop an interactive kiosk platform that scales seamlessly across multiple centers, remains fully customizable to each location’s unique specifications and nuances, and still meets demanding, high-profile deadlines?

The Solution

Yeti partnered with Westfield’s product management team to co-create a product roadmap and architectural plan to hit immediate deadlines in the short term and then iterate to a scalable kiosk management platform.

As Yeti’s team first assessed the existing kiosk project, it was clear that a majority of it needed to be re-written as it was using an outdated and deprecated frontend framework. This was an important decision to be made as it would allow us to iterate faster and hit the first major launch deadline instead of trying to band-aid the existing software solution that was already in place.

We decided to rebuild the kiosk using React, as the framework’s component structure would allow us to create re-usable pieces that could be utilized in subsequent malls, based on their needs. This meshed well with the concept of layout orientations and feature flags which were developed later in the product roadmap.

After delivering the first set of kiosk launches, we turned our attention to scaling the software into a platform that would allow future malls to implement kiosks quickly, and without custom development. This involved reworking the original administrative portal allowed for all the potential configurations that would be necessary for each future installation.

To do so, we worked with Westfield’s product management team to create a robust feature set of user stories that would cover all likely launch and configuration scenarios. Adding complexity to this process, was the integration of the mapping and wayfinding software platform, Jibestream, which we utilized to manage the locations and directions to specific floors, elevators, amenities, among many other points of interest.

Yeti’s team collaborated with Westfield for over a year to expand the platform from the first Westfield mall to several others. The transition from one center, to multiple configurable centers incurred quite a bit of technical debt that came from changing requirements, new design changes, and the usual software updates.

A key piece of Yeti’s development strategy was to consistently scope and execute on technical debt tasks, while keeping the codebase covered by automated tests. With many high profile and visible kiosks at malls, it has been important to ensure updates and improvements for new centers do not affect any existing ones.