Hot Fast Food Vending Machine

Hot Food Vending Machine

Many locations, be they corporate break rooms or colleges have a variety of vending machines. Recently, there have been a number of specialty hot food vending machines, typically serving a very limited menu. With the innovative design of this machine, multiple restaurants may be vended from one machine. We developed an HMI (human-machine interface, or touchscreen) version, as well as, a mobile app. Although the two displays are very different, the colors, fonts utilized, as well as the tile menu format, all provide visual cues that it is the same product.
This project is still in development, with usability testing having just wrapped up.

By surveying students at a local community college, we reconfirmed that both national brands and local products were likely to do well, with lunch, dinner and snack foods being the most natural purchases. This led us to develop an app and HMI that could accommodate four different restaurants’ selections, with traffic management limiting orders to four food items per order. At the same time, some of the food partners the client was negotiating with would likely have more limited offerings.  By using a ‘tile’ menu item system, we were able to provide a ‘complete visual menu’ for either case, and for both platforms.

We whiteboarded the HMI at actual size and height to understand not only reach limitations, but also comfort levels for larger standing Users.  We realized and then convinced all that the original design required further refinement, both in the standard screen and in the “ADA Swap” version.

The machine has two large HMIs, as well as, two side screens that would showcase products, the weather, upcoming events, etc. As currently set to run, one of the front screens displays the Menu, while the other tracks the orders in the Queue. In the iteration shown above, it is easy to see the original product requirement to stock the machine with products from multiple sources and to be able to filter by restaurant or brand. Future generations of the machine will have cameras to sense approaching customers, allowing either front screen to display the Menu & vice versa. Built-in microphones will also ‘talk’ through the order providing further accessibility.

With the understanding that the client was trying to get a prototype machine in the field for usability testing in the spring of 2020, we created a ‘white labeled’ app and HMI. In doing so, we’ll easily be able to drop in images and adjust colors and fonts to match various food partner brands as well as provide a neutral background for instances where a fulfillment partner stocks the machine with a few local brands. Now onto those partners!

Client: NDA - How do you do nondescript really well?

Project: Hot fast food vending machine UX Design

Dates: Mid-Nov 2019 - Feb 2020, Mar 2020 - Present*

Role: Contract UX Designer with Mixer Design Group

Self-employed Contract UX Designer*
(*This phase being developed into a separate Case Study)

Software: Figma, Test Flight, TeamGantt, GoToMeeting/Zoom, MS PowerPoint, MS Word, & MS Excel,

React Native developer coordination