I was waiting in line at McDonald’s for a coke. The McDonald’s in Union Square has kiosks to order off of, because they don’t always have cashiers to make the transactions. The person in front of me (and I when it was my turn) had trouble ordering off of the kiosk.
The most frustrating thing about the kiosk is, there’s absolutely no affordances when you tap something. Normally when you have an interface or an object you know it’s being tapped because it highlights the portion that has been tapped or has a loading indicator. The person was trying to order some McNuggets but when they tapped on the menu item nothing had occurred. This quickly led to the person trying all sorts of different ways of jabbing their finger into the screen as hard as they could. The lack of knowing what the kiosk is doing here is the real problem because we expect when we touch something, it reacts to us. After the kiosk had finally picked up the person’s tap, it didn’t choose the right menu item. That process was started again when they were trying to hit the cancel button and go back.
When you usually go through interacting with a touchscreen or an object, we need to know that the object has taken, accepted our input and is doing something with it. It had no signifiers and when it actually did they were delayed. When they went to pay at the kiosk, there was nothing telling the person to use the terminal to pay with their card. Just “pay here” was posted with all of the payment options. I thought it was particularly interesting because this is supposed to take less time than a cashier and yet I couldn’t help but think I might’ve already ordered by the time this actually finished. My ideas to improve the kiosk would make it more responsive and if it’s not recognizing a tap on a button at least put a dot to indicate where the person tapped, so they can tap more precisely if that’s the issue. People need to know what the kiosk is doing when they’re trying to order their food.