McInterface

McInterface
User Interface Design & Development Project
SIMS 213, Spring 2001

: Linda Harjono, Saifon Obromsook, John Yiu Chi Wai

Summary Report

Problem Statement

In the competitive fast-food industry, fast-food restaurants have to maintain efficiency in their standard operations and keep up with the quality of their products and services. However, we think that there are some issues concerning the traditional way to order food in fast-food restaurants. The major issues are the following:

Verbal Communications between Cashiers and Customers
Verbal communications between the two parties are prone to errors during busy hours. When the place is very crowded and noisy, miscommunications are common. The problem is even worsen if the cashier and/or the customers do not speak the native language.

Food Customization
The ability to customize food has been a crucial business strategy in the fast-food industry since Burger King launched the ‘HAVE IT YOUR WAY’ Campaign. Food customization allows some flexibility for customers who have special requests for their orders (less ice for the soda, no pickles, etc.) and is especially necessary for customers who are allergic to some ingredients. Currently, the cashiers has to memorize these requests since the existing system does not support any means of recording such requests. The result is that the requests are forgotten or miscommunicated to the cook.

Menu Display
Today’s fierce competition within the fast-food industry motivates each restaurant to launch new items on their menus on a more frequent basis. However, the menus in most fast food shops are usually permanently attached to the upper wall behind the counter and not always up-to-date. Furthermore, not all items on the menus have graphical illustrations to help customers make their choices, and the prints are sometimes too small to read.

Solution Overview

We believe that an electronic ordering system can help alleviate these problems. Exploiting today's information technology, we can devise an electronic system that displays the menu, allows customers to customize their orders, takes the orders, and processes the payment. The system should minimize verbal communications between the customers and the cashiers, thereby reduce stresses due to miscommunications in a noisy environment. It should also accommodate food customizing and have a more appealing menu display.

There are several possible implementations of such system. For example, the ordering system can be implemented on a web interface, allowing customers to order from home before prior to their arrivals to the store. The system can also be a kiosk in the store itself, operating in tandem to the human cashier. For our project, we choose to design an interface for the latter schema because it has more potential to be implemented in reality. Also, the interface should conveniently be modified to accommodate drive-though order processing in the future.

Our choice of fast-food restaurant is McDonald’s. We anticipate the system to be a walk-up station with a touch screen and a payment handling system. Given this scenario, we are already given some design constraints as the following:

The interface should accommodate users that have no prior training of how to use the system.
The limit on the maximum amount of information on a touch screen is low compared to interfaces that support other navigating devices.
Fast-food customers tend to prefer getting their food as fast as possible. This is in conflict with our attempt to satisfy those who have special requests for their orders
The menu display should be at least as appealing as the current menu display.

We expect primary users of the system to be McDonald’s frequent customers. Repeat customers are usually already familiar with the menu and might also care more about discounted combination meals and specials. We assume that our primary users should at least be comfortable using an ATM.