Case study

QSR Kiosk Go-Live

An estate-wide kiosk rollout taken from concept to live across a fast-growing quick-service brand.

Ordering kiosk screen in a quick-service restaurant
Client
Confidential QSR brand
Role
Head of Product Design
Sector
Quick-service restaurants
stores live in the first year
100+
months from concept to estate-wide
9

Go-live is a design discipline

Plenty of design work ends at handover. A kiosk go-live is the opposite. It's where configurable design meets reality at full speed, store by store, with lunch service as the deadline. This project took our kiosk platform live across the estate of a fast-growing quick-service brand.

An estate rollout means brand theming, menu architecture, hardware, payments, store operations and staff training all landing together. Each store is its own small launch, with its own layout, its own network quirks and its own Saturday rush. The design question changes from does this work to does this work here, today, at volume, multiplied across an expanding estate, until the rollout stops being a phase and becomes a capability.

Landing without breaking lunch

After the first few stores we settled into a rhythm, and the rhythm turned out to be the real deliverable:

  • Menu and modifier structures validated against what each kitchen could actually make at speed
  • Brand theming applied through the platform's token system, so the kiosk read as the brand's flagship channel rather than white-label software
  • Hardware placement walked in person, because guest flow in a real store ignores floor plans
  • Staff trained on the failure states first, since a kiosk that misbehaves at noon needs a human who already knows what to do
  • Accessibility checked on the physical setup as well as the screen, with reach, height and glare all included

A rollout doesn't care how good the design review was. It cares what happens at noon on a Saturday.

Team and credits

Rollouts are won by the people standing in the stores, and this one had good people in a lot of stores.

  • The design team, who tuned theming and journeys against live estate conditions
  • Platform engineering, who handled configuration, integrations and the store-by-store surprises that always arrive
  • Customer success and rollout teams, who owned the go-live calendar and kept it believable
  • The brand's own operations and store staff, who told us exactly where the design met reality and where it didn't

What I'd do differently

I'd put designers in stores earlier. The most valuable corrections came from watching real guests in the first live week, and we could have had those answers in store one rather than store ten. Watching a guest hesitate in front of a screen teaches you more than a month of dashboards, and it's cheaper than the redesign you'll otherwise do later.

One note on what's missing here. The full story, with the brand's name and numbers attached, exists and is worth telling. Publishing it waits on the brand's permission, which is the right order to do things in.