Toast Kiosk Redesign

Description

Toast is a company that develops kiosks for restaurants. They develop hardware as well as software solutions. For the customer-facing software, they have a template that they reuse for different restaurants (by changing the colors, fonts, etc.). Thus the redesign was an attempt to understand the features that users want and to come up with a design solution (template) that caters to making the experience better for a wide number of users. The goal of the project was to understand the design process from research to concept to prototyping by redesign the functionality of the Toast kiosk.

Methodology

There were multiple steps involved in the redesign process. Basic user research of five participants was conducted to gather people’s opinions about kiosks and one restaurant owner was interviewed to understand their thoughts about kiosks. Based on the participant responses, two Personas were identified and designs were catered towards them. In order to improve the current design, a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) was done of Toast and three competitors, namely Bon Me, McDonald’s, and Panera Bread which helped in creating initial sketches. With small improvements to the sketches, low-fidelity wireframes were created which were used for the actual user testing.

This image shows one of the user flows created.
They resembled real scenarios so that the user goes through each screen in a particular order which makes sense. Six participants were recruited to test the user flows based on the two personas. With the data collected from testing, changes were made to the wireframes and medium-high fidelity prototypes were created using Figma.

Research and Analysis

From the initial research, we found out that there were two groups of people, ones who preferred placing orders via kiosks, and the others who didn’t. The demographics showed that the ones who preferred ordering via kiosks were younger people, generally in the age group of 18 to 24; and the other group included people who were a bit older, generally in the age group of 27-50. The two personas were created based on this observation.

The image on the right shows the SWOT analysis of Toast. SWOT analysis of the four restaurants helped us identify the key factors that influence the usability of a kiosk. They were 1 - Flexible and customizable ordering options, 2 – Ability to search specific menu items, multiple ways to sign in, etc.
After analyzing the user testing data key factors were identified that affect the usability of the kiosk, 1 – Providing guidance to infrequent users, 2 – Communicating to the user where in the process they currently were, 3 – Keeping a simple flow to support users with all experience levels. More detailed findings can be found in the report linked below. This data was used to make improvements to the prototype and create medium-high fidelity interactive prototypes.

Redesign

The initial sketches were converted into low-fidelity wireframes using Whimsical and then imported to InVision for adding interactions for testing. After the testing stage, these wireframes were converted to medium-high fidelity prototypes using Figma. The image on the right shows the menu page wireframe. The images below are the final prototypes created by making a few changes to the wireframes based on the data obtained from user testing.

Results

Along with the prototype, a few recommendations were provided. They include 1 – Establishing a design pattern to maintain consistency across screens, 2 – Some way to save customer information for storing past orders, 3 – Customizing the interface based on user habits, etc. The full list of recommendations can be found in the detailed report linked below. The actual interactive prototype can be found using the following links: Returning Customer Flow (Customer Profile) / Returning Customer Flow (Previous Order) / New Customer Flow

Next Steps

One additional feature we thought of but couldn’t implement in the design was the concept of Gamification. A component of rewards could be added to increase ordering and promote upselling (for e.g. suggesting a drink along with a burger). Before trying to implement this feature, further testing would be needed to understand user habits related to actually buying more when suggestions are provided.