Why the dojo door needs its own kiosk mode

Six minutes past six on a Wednesday evening. The coach is putting on their gi in the changing room. The dojo door opens, and Sophie arrives with her dad and her younger brother. Two minutes later the Ahmeds turn up — three children, all training, plus mum, who’s on her own monthly plan. By twenty-five past six, fourteen people have to be checked in, marked attended, and on the mat ready to bow in.

How do they sign in?

The wrong answers

There’s a clipboard by the door — Option A, the sign-in sheet. It costs nothing. It produces nothing usable. Three weeks later, you try to remember whether Sophie made it on the 12th, and the only way to find out is to leaf through the clipboard. A coach can’t report on attendance trends from a stack of A4.

Option B is the coach’s phone. The coach unlocks it, finds Club Forge, scrolls to find Sophie, taps “mark attended,” repeats fourteen times. That’s thirty seconds per person if you’re fast. It’s also a phone in the coach’s hand when they should be teaching.

Option C is a generic kiosk app on a tablet. Better — but the kiosk apps are mostly built for gyms, where the workflow is “scan a QR code or type your phone number.” A nine-year-old doesn’t have a phone. Their parent might, but the parent isn’t at the door — they’ve already left to do the weekly shop. The QR code on a sticker in their wallet is on a sticker in their wallet, which is in the car.

The principle

The management view and kiosk mode are doing fundamentally different jobs.

The management view is dense and complex. It expects training. It has to show member profiles, grading history, family relationships, memberships, communications, GDPR records, and so on. It runs on a coach’s phone or laptop. The person using it knows what they’re doing, and uses it for hours a week.

The student tablet is the opposite of dense. It’s used for thirty seconds, by anyone, including small children. The interface has to be obvious. The interaction has to be one-handed. The data it shows has to be the minimum necessary — anything more is a distraction at the door.

Trying to build both into one app makes both worse. The admin gets cluttered with oversized tap targets. The kiosk gets cluttered with admin features that students don’t need. The compromise lands in the middle, suiting neither.

What the student tablet does

Three things, in order of frequency:

• PIN check-in. Member walks in, taps the screen, enters a short PIN. The screen confirms with their name, and the session is recorded. Thirty seconds, end to end.
• Family view.Parents enter their PIN, see a list of every child they’re responsible for, and tap the ones training tonight. One transaction for the whole family.
• Student portal. On a private screen, students can see their current rank, grading history, and attendance streak. The portal auto-locks after each session, so the next person at the tablet starts fresh.

That’s the lot. No notifications. No dashboard. No marketing screens. No “join our community” modals.

What it deliberately doesn’t do

The tablet isn’t personal. It’s a piece of club furniture. The design assumes shared use from the first second:

• No persistent login. Every interaction is a fresh session.
• No saved data. The screen auto-locks after each action.
• No notifications, no banners, no tickers. The screen sits idle when no one’s using it, except for an unobtrusive welcome state.
• No personal data accessible without the PIN. If the device is stolen, there’s nothing on it.

Some of these are subtractions. Most software wants more: more engagement, more time-on-device, more interactions per session. The tablet wants less. A successful session with the student tablet is thirty seconds and forgotten.

Why this is unusual

Most UK martial arts software either has no tablet support at all, or it offers a “kiosk mode” that hides some menus and enlarges some buttons. The interface is the same. The assumptions are the same. The result is an admin tool with a different skin.

Club Forge builds kiosk mode as a purpose-built surface from the start — not a settings toggle on the owner view. Both share the same backend and data layer, but diverge entirely above that: different navigation, different layouts, different interaction models, different security assumptions. The owner and coach view runs on their own phone or laptop. Kiosk mode runs on a shared device at the door. Same app. Different jobs.

The closing thought

Design is mostly about what you leave out. The student tablet is almost entirely about what it doesn’t do. No notifications, no marketing, no upsells, no engagement loops, no lingering data, no personal device assumptions, no admin features bleeding through.

What’s left is the smallest possible interface for the smallest possible job: getting a student into a class. That’s all the dojo door needs.

More on the architecture on the how it works page, and on the student tablet itself here.