Sunday, June 17, 2018
I recently did what many people say they don’t do, but secretly do. I ate at McDonald’s. My house is undergoing a kitchen renovation, so the family is getting fast food more often than we would like. We thought a trip to McDonald’s would be good, because our little one could play in the play area afterwards, since she’s a toddler and tends to toddle a lot. It turns out she needed socks (she was wearing sandals), and she had to be at least 3 years old (she’s not), so that didn’t happen. This is all a side to note to the more interesting point of this post, which involved me regrettably using their self-serve kiosk.
Despite my intuition to not use the kiosk, I was curious. Well, I wasn’t just curious, I had to use it. I wanted to see how they attempted to automate the process of ordering fast food. It couldn’t be as bad as the time I tried to order pizza online from Pizza Nova on my iPad 2 (it was a while ago and my best friend still makes fun of me for it). I ended up not ordering the pizza, because the app gave me so many choices for pizza. I didn’t even know if I was ordering a standard pizza, anymore. Anyways, back to the kiosk. I don’t remember every exact detail, but I do remember a key thing that caught me off guard. I expected to see the menu that you typically see when you order from a human being. I expected to see meals (number 1, number 3), but instead I saw a bunch of options. So I started guessing. I guessed, and got to where I needed to go and finally got to the part just before paying. I was frustrated at this point and I just wanted to pay for my food and get it, but it was asking me for an order number or something. It was two digits, so I just thought you put in two numbers, and that’s it. Like an order identifier (but what if someone picked the same number? Oh, well). After I put in the number, the kiosk tells me that the order buzzer with your number will vibrate when your order is ready. There was a stack of buzzers to the left of me, none of which had my “order number”. So, now I realized I had to go to the counter to tell them I screwed up, which ultimately defeated the whole purpose of using the kiosk. What added insult to injury was that there was about 12-15 people ahead of me and they all got served before I was finished using the kiosk. The future is friendly?
The first thing that went wrong was that I used the kiosk. That was my first mistake. That was meant to be a joke, but now that I think about it, it really was a mistake. The kiosk probably wasn’t meant for me. I’m not someone who frequents McDonald’s, so I’ll probably forget how to use it when I go back there in 5 years, when another major part of my house is being renovated. Had I been someone who goes to McDonald’s twice a month, then it might make sense. Maybe. I could have invested in learning a new high tech way to order fast food, but alas, it is not my destiny. Typically, when I use these self-serve kiosks I expect it to be dead simple and if it’s not, I want my hand to be held. I’m reminded of an example from a human computer interaction course I took in university that involved digitizing the monitoring systems for a nuclear reactor. In the example, the monitoring data was now being displayed through a new digital graphical interface, instead of the old analog display. The staff complained. It was different, it didn’t make sense to them and they couldn’t use it. So, the developers ended up making the digital graphical interface look like the old analog display and then everyone was happy. McDonald’s could have shown me at least something similar to the menu that I typically order from, but they didn’t. I think that was a key frustrating point for me, because I felt like I wasn’t ordering food anymore, I felt like I was learning and I didn’t want to learn at that moment, I wanted to eat.