Before we get hung up on WHY I was at McDonald’s, let’s take a look at the drive-thru. In the interest of efficiency, several franchises have installed a second drive-thru window in their restaurants, ostensibly to make their process more efficient. The net effect is that there are three interaction points (let’s call them ‘screens’): ordering (the menu and speakerbox), paying (the first window) and getting your food (the second window). And while there’s a lot of broken user experience on the first screen (the speakerbox), I’m more interested in the second one.
The first drive-thru window in a two window system is ONLY there so that you can pay McDonald’s for your food. What’s more, the McDonald’s employee at that window is also the employee you talk to when you place your order. Also, the floor inside the drive through area is about 15 inches higher than the ground your car rests on, which means that the drive through employee is MUCH higher up than you are. Taken together, this means that your user experience at the second screen is one in which you look up at them, which creates a power imbalance, you WAIT for the employee to be done talking to someone else, and then you give that employee your money. That’s it.
For starters, the incentives here are all wrong. You have to wait to pay them money, and in exchange for that money, you get to move forward? Broken. I suppose you could make the argument that you get your food in a minute, but what if I presented a terrible UX experience in my software, and told you “don’t worry, it gets better on the next screen?” That’s not an attitude conducive to long-term employment.
“But wait,” McDonalds says. “We’re trying to make it FASTER. And we’re worried about fraud. Pay us first, then we’ll give you your food—and because there are two people, it’s faster in total.” Unfortunately, this fails from a reciprocity point of view—you’re more likely to create a positive UX if you give me something and THEN ask me for something than if you do it the other way around. And taken by itself, the first drive-thru window is a reciprocity nightmare—McDonalds asks you for something, full stop.
The speed argument doesn’t hold water either. Because I’m forced to wait at the speaker, the pay window, and the food window, I get the “ugh, I’m waiting in line,” feeling three times. Even if these waits are short, the psychological effects of repeated waiting are large. To wit: three 10second waits feels longer than one 40second wait.
“Fine,” says McDonalds. “It’s broken. But how do I fix it?” Pretty simple: hand me my drink(s) at the first window, BEFORE I pay. This solves the reciprocity problem (you give me something before I give you something), and it eases the wait problem (I have straws to open and insert while I sit there), and it’s a very limited fraud risk (because I have cars in front of me, at the first window, and because you’ve only given me a small portion of my order). All you’d have to do is move the drive-thru soda fountain to the back of the restaurant, and you’d be in business. Oh, and when you’re building new restaurants? Go ahead and lower the drive-thru attendants to something below monster-truck height. Fixed.
