This might be a case where a kiosk touchscreen is better. I've used them in-store. It's not a bad system, plus you would pay there instead of "pull up to the first window".
Plus a touchscreen works for hearing impaired people.
Plus a touchscreen works for hearing impaired people.
Automating the jobs that humans are good at and pushing people to do repetitive soul wrenching jobs that machines should de better is the wrong path IMHO.
The human at the counter sets the tone and the mood, which is part of the eating. That's true even at fast food mega chains even when the order taking employees follow a script and do it time after time.
While not too dissimilar, I like to think of it as ordering something from the replicator like in Star Trek.
They do not. :(
As far as the human at the counter setting the tone and mood: I have had very few fast food interactions where this human made it a positive experience. "Meh" at best, and often not-good to bad.
Most drive-thrus I've ever seen (Ohio, US) have zero cover and you are completely exposed to whatever mother nature wants to throw at you. Even the service window itself may have a tiny 24" awning that barely helps. In fact in my experience during rain it makes it worse as you get runoff right on top of the vehicle since they don't have rain gutters.
They were no doubt just told by their boss, and their boss's boss, to 'prove that McDonald's is using AI.'
Even more, for people unfamiliar with it or who aren’t comfortable with computer interfaces.
Not good for drive-through throughput.
And where Amazon “pioneered” one-click checkout, what, 20 years ago? Those kiosks have a path like view cart -> checkout -> decline upsells -> don’t use app to pay -> choose credit card -> enter table number -> tap card -> choose receipt.
Each one of those is a whole new screen. On a 40”-ish monitor! It is insane, and could easily be one screen with a couple of options. And just tapping a card should checkout and pay at any time.
Not a fan of McDonald’s but I wanted to see what they were doing with self serve tech. Nothing good, it turns out.
Another case like self checkouts of “automation” in the form of making the customer do more work than it took a paid worker to accomplish the same thing, but not actually automating a damn thing.
That's the result of the advertising department desperately wanting to track you for their metrics.
> Each one of those is a whole new screen. On a 40”-ish monitor! It is insane, and could easily be one screen with a couple of options.
This was most likely the result of some UI designer fearing that they would scare away too many folks with choice fatigue if they put all the options on a single screen all at once.
Sadly they forgot to add a button for "I'm a technically adept user who would like a single screen with all options please" to let those of us who would not be scared away by that complexity select that version as an option.
If you've never seen a Sonic, it's organized like a gas station. Replace gas pump with kiosk.
simply select what you want, have your favorites saved and go. When I had my first blackberry I envisioned that you'd be able to order everything there.
Ordering a "big mac with fries and a coke" at the drive-thru window takes less time than reading this comment. Why would anyone want to spend five minutes installing an app, creating an account, figuring out how the app works, and finally placing an order?
The argument is don't force all, 100% of customers to install an app, because it gets frustrating, and then you loose some percentage of customers that just walk away to order somewhere easier.
I sign in to the apps with SSO (usually Apple, sometimes Google), so I don't need to "make" an account.
And I pay with Apple Pay which is already set up in my phone too.
If I'm on a road trip, and I need a quick meal, and my choices are "buy from place that makes me use their app" or "buy from place that doesn't make me use their app", I'm gonna choose the option that is more convenient to me, which is, the one that doesn't make me download anything, sign up for an account, and pester the hell out of me 2 hours after I have already forgotten about that particular fast food joint to let me know if that if I only buy 39 more Big Macs that I can get a free small fry.
I don't really want fast food to begin with. The food quality at any vendor has continuously gone downhill (or my standards have raised, could be some combination therein). If they want any hope of capturing my business still, they'll only get it if they keep that process as frictionless as possible.
Doesn't even need to be app driven.
Heck, it could even be written in less than 500 lines of perl.
Still slow, but touches register more consistently.
Much cleaner.
I also dislike having to use a screen rather that interacting with a person for this sort of thing in the first place, but that's personal preference rather than anything about the kiosk system in particular.
Besides, the world is full of germs, in fact you would die without them. They are no big deal.
But in a drive-through, somehow, I don't think there will be options. I bet it would be one thing or the other.
Can we expect 100,000 customers per year to get within touching distance of a touchscreen, without hitting it?
Everyday I see people need to open their car door and half lean out to reach the screen. But what is option, drive away and not have money?
Couldn't we just have the screen move towards the user, using a basic proximity sensor? We've had car wash systems adapt to the car's size for quite a few years now, so it should be a relatively cheap solution, no?
I really doubt it would be cheap. As soon as you bring motors and the electronics to control them into the mix, you're going to have an increased rate of of failure. Even if the initial install is inexpensive (which I doubt), the maintenance costs would increase a lot.