6 ms·

Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?

bluedino 7y ago
We have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through.
- randomdata 7y ago
  The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    Custom orders are really slow to enter
    - JetSpiegel 7y ago
      You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.
- shantly 7y ago
  The couple I've seen have had bad menus (what? Options? I just want the damn thing like usual, there are options? I don't care, where the hell is the "just buy it like normal" button?) and have suffered from the same jank that every non-Apple touchscreen I've used has, somewhere on the medium-bad side of that spectrum. Feels like HTML+JS running on Android, which is very possibly exactly what it is. Missed touches, animation stutter, stuff like that. They're way worse than just ordering.
  - alexmlamb 7y ago
    I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.
    - shantly 7y ago
      Maybe they're A/B testing or they've changed. The ones I've seen took you through a screen or two of options and such before adding whatever you'd selected to your order, with the "just friggin' add it" button far less obviously placed than it should have been. Also took some thinking to figure out where certain things might be in the menu. [EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- noitsnot 7y ago
  I can beat one customer and cashier most of the time. I'm just one person at lunch and know what I want. A customer will stand up there and make decisions and not have payment ready, etc.
blisterpeanuts 7y ago
The local Mickey D's put in a couple of tall touch-screen systems that I found surprisingly difficult to figure out. The touch screen was slow to respond -- nothing more frustrating than tapping a glass screen and wondering why nothing happened -- and the decision path didn't make sense. I suspect whoever designed it had one kind of user experience in mind, then it was modified by a different group to change the UX, leaving it worse than before. Anyway, I notice that no one uses it, and I visit frequently (it's so close that I often drop by to get the $0.99 coffee, and now my 14-year-old has started working there).
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  The one at mine is a completely smooth experience.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Same here. His McD's must have cheaped out.
- mike_d 7y ago
  My local McD had touch screens with exactly the experience you describe. I got in the habit of repeatedly tapping until I got the button to respond. This last week I noticed the UI had some major improvements and was ultra snappy. I expect they took user feedback and are slow rolling a version 2.0.
neom 7y ago
The McDs touch screen location in Union Square is the most annoying thing ever, it's very slow, oddly hard to understand, and if you want mostly diet coke with a little root beer on top, you can't order it.
- behringer 7y ago
  Couldn't figure out how to order a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. After wasting 5 mins navigating around I had to cancel and order from the human. Why put myself through that? If anything goes wrong, the order taker knows how to deal with it. So I just order from the human now.
pmart123 7y ago
Panera has a great touchscreen experience.
- rackad 7y ago
  For the past year or so, there are touchscreen monitors in all McDonalds. So they are already replacing slowly employees by machines.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Problem with my local panera is that half the time there aren't any pagers at the touchscreen station, while there's a 3 foot stack of them at the register. Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  They do have the issue that they run out of baked goods but don't update the state of the ordering system. I assume it is legitimately difficult to keep perfect inventory of the items to make that work, but it does lead to some confusion.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Sounds like McDonalds is making the same mistake the automobile companies made with their infotainment systems, cutting corners to save on hardware and just being too inexperienced on software. The infotainment systems of the past couple of years have been a huge improvement over those of the past decade so maybe McDonalds and the food service industry in general will just have to go through the same painful process the car companies did.
- cbhl 7y ago
  What I don't understand is why the McDonald's mobile apps are region-locked. If I am an American and I visit Canada or Japan, why do I have to use the register or kiosk? I should be able to use mobile ordering, just like back home.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrjdjdhhedh 7y ago
    How myopic for you have to be to not just wonder why a mcd app in Japan would not be expected to work in the us but to say that's how it should be? All the complex shit that goes into a company like mcd in a single country and you expect what you're expecting?
  - bfung 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I currently work at a company in the QSR+mobile ordering space It takes a TON of work to get the menus+availability, payments, local tax laws, security/privacy right for specific regions. Menus are not a solved problem - think about the case where a user wants a fillet o'fish, but hold the sauce and the top bun. Is the fillet o'fish the same item in the US as in Japan, even? What about other regional items? etc. Also - McDonald's is run by McDonald's corporate and Franchisee's. Sometimes, corporate has the buying power, but most of the time, it's the individual franchisees that make the buy decision - for even things like mobile apps and ordering. Many times, restaurant brands you see here in the US, when traveling, are owned and operated by completely different sets of corporate beings.
burgerzzz 7y ago
I would avoid it just because of all of the various fingers that have touched it before me.
- noobiemcfoob 7y ago
  You mean...like the doorknobs?
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    If you make doorknobs out of brass, they might still get poop on them, but many types of bacteria and viruses can’t survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_copper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co... Maybe we can start making public touchscreens out of brass...
    - noobiemcfoob 7y ago
      Ok, but most doorknobs aren't brass.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - johnisgood 7y ago
    How many doorknobs do you typically touch outside of your home a day? Most doors here are automatic. Plus, I would be reluctant to use someone else's keyboard at work, even.
    - noobiemcfoob 7y ago
      But...why? Do you have an autoimmune disorder? Generally find yourself especially vulnerable to the errant bug? How do you feel when you breath in someone's fart? You're a walking bag of mud expressing discomfort at other bits of mud in the world. One bit in a million might be annoying. One in a billion actually painful.
Spooky23 7y ago
This may be my old man moment. I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever. I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.

bluedino 7y ago

We have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through.

randomdata 7y ago
The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Custom orders are really slow to enter
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.
shantly 7y ago
The couple I've seen have had bad menus (what? Options? I just want the damn thing like usual, there are options? I don't care, where the hell is the "just buy it like normal" button?) and have suffered from the same jank that every non-Apple touchscreen I've used has, somewhere on the medium-bad side of that spectrum. Feels like HTML+JS running on Android, which is very possibly exactly what it is. Missed touches, animation stutter, stuff like that. They're way worse than just ordering.
- alexmlamb 7y ago
  I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Maybe they're A/B testing or they've changed. The ones I've seen took you through a screen or two of options and such before adding whatever you'd selected to your order, with the "just friggin' add it" button far less obviously placed than it should have been. Also took some thinking to figure out where certain things might be in the menu. [EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
noitsnot 7y ago
I can beat one customer and cashier most of the time. I'm just one person at lunch and know what I want. A customer will stand up there and make decisions and not have payment ready, etc.

blisterpeanuts 7y ago

The local Mickey D's put in a couple of tall touch-screen systems that I found surprisingly difficult to figure out. The touch screen was slow to respond -- nothing more frustrating than tapping a glass screen and wondering why nothing happened -- and the decision path didn't make sense. I suspect whoever designed it had one kind of user experience in mind, then it was modified by a different group to change the UX, leaving it worse than before. Anyway, I notice that no one uses it, and I visit frequently (it's so close that I often drop by to get the $0.99 coffee, and now my 14-year-old has started working there).

jimmaswell 7y ago
The one at mine is a completely smooth experience.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Same here. His McD's must have cheaped out.
mike_d 7y ago
My local McD had touch screens with exactly the experience you describe. I got in the habit of repeatedly tapping until I got the button to respond. This last week I noticed the UI had some major improvements and was ultra snappy. I expect they took user feedback and are slow rolling a version 2.0.

neom 7y ago

The McDs touch screen location in Union Square is the most annoying thing ever, it's very slow, oddly hard to understand, and if you want mostly diet coke with a little root beer on top, you can't order it.

behringer 7y ago
Couldn't figure out how to order a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. After wasting 5 mins navigating around I had to cancel and order from the human. Why put myself through that? If anything goes wrong, the order taker knows how to deal with it. So I just order from the human now.

pmart123 7y ago

Panera has a great touchscreen experience.

rackad 7y ago
For the past year or so, there are touchscreen monitors in all McDonalds. So they are already replacing slowly employees by machines.
judge2020 7y ago
Problem with my local panera is that half the time there aren't any pagers at the touchscreen station, while there's a 3 foot stack of them at the register. Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.
nitwit005 7y ago
They do have the issue that they run out of baked goods but don't update the state of the ordering system. I assume it is legitimately difficult to keep perfect inventory of the items to make that work, but it does lead to some confusion.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

Sounds like McDonalds is making the same mistake the automobile companies made with their infotainment systems, cutting corners to save on hardware and just being too inexperienced on software. The infotainment systems of the past couple of years have been a huge improvement over those of the past decade so maybe McDonalds and the food service industry in general will just have to go through the same painful process the car companies did.

cbhl 7y ago
What I don't understand is why the McDonald's mobile apps are region-locked. If I am an American and I visit Canada or Japan, why do I have to use the register or kiosk? I should be able to use mobile ordering, just like back home.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jrjdjdhhedh 7y ago
  How myopic for you have to be to not just wonder why a mcd app in Japan would not be expected to work in the us but to say that's how it should be? All the complex shit that goes into a company like mcd in a single country and you expect what you're expecting?
- bfung 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I currently work at a company in the QSR+mobile ordering space It takes a TON of work to get the menus+availability, payments, local tax laws, security/privacy right for specific regions. Menus are not a solved problem - think about the case where a user wants a fillet o'fish, but hold the sauce and the top bun. Is the fillet o'fish the same item in the US as in Japan, even? What about other regional items? etc. Also - McDonald's is run by McDonald's corporate and Franchisee's. Sometimes, corporate has the buying power, but most of the time, it's the individual franchisees that make the buy decision - for even things like mobile apps and ordering. Many times, restaurant brands you see here in the US, when traveling, are owned and operated by completely different sets of corporate beings.

burgerzzz 7y ago

I would avoid it just because of all of the various fingers that have touched it before me.

noobiemcfoob 7y ago
You mean...like the doorknobs?
- jacobolus 7y ago
  If you make doorknobs out of brass, they might still get poop on them, but many types of bacteria and viruses can’t survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_copper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co... Maybe we can start making public touchscreens out of brass...
  - noobiemcfoob 7y ago
    Ok, but most doorknobs aren't brass.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- johnisgood 7y ago
  How many doorknobs do you typically touch outside of your home a day? Most doors here are automatic. Plus, I would be reluctant to use someone else's keyboard at work, even.
  - noobiemcfoob 7y ago
    But...why? Do you have an autoimmune disorder? Generally find yourself especially vulnerable to the errant bug? How do you feel when you breath in someone's fart? You're a walking bag of mud expressing discomfort at other bits of mud in the world. One bit in a million might be annoying. One in a billion actually painful.

Spooky23 7y ago

This may be my old man moment. I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever. I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.