Guildford Action
A public internet kiosk for a charity
A touchscreen kiosk for people who come to Guildford Action for help: one big search box, four topic cards and the links they use most, with nothing saved between users and a reset when it is left alone.
the brief
Guildford Action supports people in Guildford who are struggling, with food, housing, benefits and more, and no referral needed. A lot of what people need to do while they are there happens online: a Universal Credit journal, a Jobcentre search, an email account, a housing application. A shared computer with a normal browser is a poor fit for that. It assumes you know where to start, it is fiddly to use by touch, and it remembers the last person.
The kiosk replaces the browser with a screen built around the question "what would you like to do today?". The second version, built in October 2026, rebuilt the home screen as a dark, search-first layout with the links grouped by what a person needs rather than where they happened to sit on the page.
what was built
- A home screen with one large search box and four topic cards: benefits and money, housing and support, email, and health, news and social. A "most used" row underneath for the handful of links people reach for every day.
- Search that stays on the kiosk. Results come from DuckDuckGo through a small server-side proxy, with no account and no API key, and are drawn in a light reading mode with larger text, tabs for images, maps, news and videos, and a sidebar pointing back to Guildford Action's own services.
- Built for touch: targets between 56 and 96 pixels, a text size control with three sizes, and a home button that is always in the same place.
- Privacy by default: a visible "Finish and clear" button, an automatic reset after five minutes without a touch, and a plain statement on screen that nothing is saved.
- A password-protected admin page where staff add, group and reorder the links themselves, mark the most used ones, and get a backup of the list every time they save.
- Plain PHP with no database, so it runs on ordinary hosting and the whole thing is a handful of files.
outcome
Someone who is not confident with computers can sit down, press the thing they came to do and get on with it, and the next person starts from a clean screen.
- client
- Guildford Action
- sector
- Charity
- year
- 2026
- disciplines
- web development, application design, kiosk deployment
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