This week we were tasked with observing interactive technology in a public setting, and how people’s experience with it went. I chose Burger King mostly out of the convenience of proximity to ITP campus. Before watching any interaction, or using it myself, my assumption was that this device was there to streamline the process of ordering and receiving food at this establishment. People would walk up, press some touch pad buttons, swipe their bank cards, and then pick up their food without burdening the already bloated queue of customers.
My first observation was incomplete. A young woman had already gone through the ordering process and was paying. She opted to use mobile pay. As far as I could tell, she was waiting 2-3 minutes for her payment to process. In the context of fast-food, that is a long time. The other users I observed chose traditional bank cards for payment, and that process seemed to go much quicker.
My second, but first complete, interaction took probably ten minutes. This thing has a lot of screens that it prompts you through, and a lot of customizability. I recognize that Burger King has a long-standing branding ethos of “Have it Your Way,” but most customers seemed confused and frustrated by it. Most people just want a Whopper with fries and a drink.
The third person I observed made it to the “fire grilled beef” menu, made several attempts at deciphering it, walked over to the analog, human-ordering line to see how long it was, looked at the digital kiosk again, and then walked out the door sans fire grilled beef.
I went through the menu prompts myself. To its design credit, I thought how to use it was pretty intuitive and straight-forward. However, the interaction was still obnoxious. There were seven screens I had to go through that asked me about things I wasn't interested in. It's not easy to get a basic, straight-forward combo meal.
The ingredient sliders were particularly annoying. I think this was in part because the design deviated from the established flow of the interactive menu. It was jarring, and also weird and unnecessary in principle. No human being at a fast food restaurant had ever asked me what proportion I would like my ingredients in, so why is this digital kiosk asking me? In the words of Donald Norman, “...it is an excess of visibility that makes the gadget-ridden, feature-laden modern… so intimidating.”
Analog in, digital out, writing in c
In our labs this week we explored the difference between analog and digital inputs and outputs. Digital meaning a sensor or actuator that works with binary on/off data, and analog meaning a sensor or actuator that works with an incremental range of data.
This was also my first time writing a program for Arduino which was pretty cool. First we simply made buttons, or switches, that turned an LED on and off. First we accomplished this without any code, using the Arduino exclusively as a power source, turning the LED on and off by closing and opening the circuit respectively. Then we built a circuit where operating the LED was dependent on our Arduino program. The end result was the same, but the mechanism was very different in ideology.
The next step was to use an analog input to create a digital output. This meant using a potentiometer (which is basically an adjustable resistor) as a dimmer for the LED. The raw data coming out of the potentiometer was too high in number, so we translated that into more palatable data by simply dividing it by four. The program looks like this:
And here is the result: