Supermacs - In Store Kiosk

Supermac’s is Ireland’s leading fast food and restaurant chain, with over a 100 outlets in Ireland and serving on average 320,000 customers per week. They also exclusively offer Papa John’s pizza both through their stores and online. Their current customer channels include an online ordering website and apps for both iOS and Android.

In early 2022, Supermac’s were looking to improve operations in their plaza based restaurants and wanted to utilise in-store kiosks like so many of their competitors had already been using. They sought our advice and guidance to help them build these kiosks.

When we met with the Supermac’s team we held a workshop to discuss the kiosk, Supermac’s expressed their desire to make their ordering process in-store more efficient. A kiosk would ultimately help to reduce error on orders made by the staff but would also allow the existing staff to focus more on other roles i.e more staff to focus on assembling the orders.

“Customers have gotten used to the ease and speed of online ordering, and increasingly expect the same level of control, choice, and personalisation when they visit a restaurant in person”

Our first goal was to research and learn as much as we could about self service kiosks and how the user experience of that would differ from a more traditional online ordering website. Our UX team researched and gathered notes to be shared with the kiosk team. This worked to keep everyone on the same page and fully understand the problem and the solution that we were trying to deliver.

Field research was conducted where we went to other service locations to observe people using self service kiosks; this helped us to gain a better understanding of how a user would ideally interact with it. We were very impressed with the speed the kiosks offered, children as young as nine could fly through the screens and put in their orders.

With our fresh insights we got to work on creating the Supermacs kiosk. The first step was to produce a medium-fidelity wireframe of the kiosk app. This allowed the UX team to quickly iterate different layouts and navigation flows for the menus. We met regularly with the Supermacs team to show our progress and created a short Figma prototype for them to use. Once we felt happy with the chosen layout, we started work on bringing the UI to life. Supermac’s new brand guidelines were followed to bring a consistent look and feel across all Supermac’s digital products. The UI was created using Figma which also allowed us to create a prototype which was then loaded onto the actual kiosk hardware unit. We were able to test the new designs in our office and have people try it out. 

The first official kiosk units were set up and running in the Galway Plaza in July 2022. They have been instrumental in reducing queue times and freeing up the staff to focus on the other roles in the busy restaurant. Supermac’s are currently in the process of deploying these kiosk units to all of their other plaza restaurants throughout 2022.