Sep 05 2008
Usability at McDonald’s
Those who know me know I love iced tea. I drink it all the time. My entire family is a huge *plain* iced tea family. No lemon. No sugar. Nothing. Plain. When I think about sweet tea, my inner ten-year-old comes out. I curl my toes, crinkle my nose and say, “ewwww.”
Where am I going with this? Stay with me. I’m getting there.
Believe it or not, McDonald’s has fantastic iced tea. Probably 2 to 3 times a week, I go through the McDonald’s drive-thru before work and get myself a large, plain iced tea. At least 1of those 3 times, I get a sweet iced tea instead. No exaggeration.
I, of course, never notice until I pull away from the window. After making the *face* and spitting it out, I usually curse the person in the window under my breath and go inside to claim my rightful plain iced tea.<sigh>
Lately I’ve given up on the drive-thru and walk my lazy butt into the restaurant in the first place to order my plain iced tea so I can serve myself and make sure it’s actually plain.
This morning I thought I’d give the drive-thru another try. It wasn’t a good idea. I received another sweet tea. This time I didn’t curse the person who filled my tea cup, because I realized it might not be their fault.
When I ordered my tea, I noticed something interesting. When you drive up to the little speaker, they have a screen that guarantees your order is correct. You can look on the screen and make sure the order on the screen matches the order you just gave.
It’s worth mentioning that my order on this screen has *never* been wrong. The order that was actually filled has been wrong about 1/3 of the time.
Here is what my order looked like on the screen:
1 LRG UNSWEET ICED TEA $1.06
Interesting. I wonder if the *sweetened* iced tea looks like this:
1 LRG SWEET ICED TEA $1.06
Hmmm … notice the difference? Maybe the order filler didn’t notice, either. In my opinion this is a usability issue. A design flaw. I can almost guarantee if the *unsweet* was replaced by *plain* or *regular* or some other non *sweet* word, the order errors would go down by quite a bit.
Usability and design issues go way beyond the web. They’re everywhere. This might not seem like a big deal to anybody but me, but remember this is *my* order, *my* inconvenience 1 out of 3 times. Remember our mantra? It’s about the user. The customer. The student.
I wonder if McDonald’s might be up for some A/B testing.
I’ve wondered for way too long they don’t just let me take over and touch my order in from a kiosk. I know what I want and the person inside is trying so hard to translate that into something … it is bound to be mistake ridden. I would bet that most people are like you — they get about the same thing every time they go to MCD. I would bet that it wouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 trips to the kiosk before you got your order wired. I’m sure it would prove to be faster and potentially more accurate — the “highly trained” staff still have to fill the order.
Before I started bussing it to work, I, too, hit the McDonalds drive-thru every morning for a large unsweetened iced tea (and on the weekend mornings as well, now that I think about it). And at least two days out of the week the experience would leave me in what I have come to refer to as a “McRage” — for two reasons:
1. The exact reason you mention — receiving a sweet tea instead of unsweetened. Even though I clearly ordered unsweetened and even though the screen showed that I had ordered unsweetened tea. I learned quickly to ask the person at the pick-up window, “It’s unsweetened, right?” And to then immediately taste it to be doubly sure.
2. Every so often I like to switch it up and have a little fresh lemon and a TINY bit of Equal in my iced tea. At some point someone at McDonalds had the bright idea to tell their servers to put the sweetener into the drink for you — whether you asked them to or not. I soon learned to order this way:
“May I please have a large UNSWEETENED iced tea with lemon and one packet of Equal ON THE SIDE?”
For reasons I cannot comprehend, I would still get a full packet of Equal in the tea. So I changed up my order to …
“”May I please have a large UNSWEETENED iced tea with lemon and one packet of Equal ON THE SIDE? PLEASE DO NOT PUT THE EQUAL IN THE CUP!”
Amazingly, every so often I would still get the full packet of Equal, so I figured I’d fix their little red McWagons and order this way …
“May I please have a large UNSWEETENED iced tea with lemon?”
And then when I’d get to the second window I’d ask for a packet of Equal.
Now it’s a much less stressful event because I ride the bus to work and stop at Panera, where they give me the cup and I handle the rest. It’s worth paying the extra 90 cents. Plus, Panera’s iced tea is always fresh and tastes so good!
[...] I mentioned in my Usability at McDonald’s post a couple weeks ago, usability goes way beyond websites. We encounter it everyday – in grocery [...]
I actually work for a McDonalds in Michigan. The iced tea and the sweet tea come out in different cups. Even if you look at the screen and think the wrong thing, you should be able to tell what it is by what cup comes out of the conveyor. The sweet tea comes out in a Styrofoam cup and the unsweetened comes out in a normal plastic one.
The problems that I have come across at our location is that people occasionally put the sweet tea or the unsweetened tea in the wrong place or put the sweet tea in the unsweetened container. We now have SEVERAL labels on ours to ensure that that doesn’t happen.
Also, I really don’t know how else that could put it on the screen to make it any more blunt that one tea is sweetened and one is not. At least for me, I have yet to give out the wrong tea to someone on my own mistake. If this is such a problem at that location, one of the managers needs to step in and start telling people to pay more attention to what they are doing (which is what their job is anyways).
I suppose the only better way of putting the two teas is to have one say sweet and the other just say tea.
I also have the problem of getting a sweet tea alot of the time when I ordered unsweet tea. Here in Iowa they give you a foam cup for sweet tea and plastic cup for unsweet. I spot it evertime but before they used plastic for both.Got me a few times.I did not spit it out but had troubles swallowing it, lol. I hate sweet tea.
So its not just me. I have ordered UNSWEET tea almost everyday for the past two weeks (playing Monopoly) and have gotten SWEET tea five times. I check my receipt… it says UNSWEET. I sometimes take the time to take a sip before driving off. Today, looking ratty and disgusting, I had to park, get out of my car and have them correct the order. Come on!!!!
I have noticed that sometimes the people at my McDonalds who have to make the sweet tea forget to stir the sugar in and so it all settles and sticks to the bottom of the large plastic tub we make it in. So when it’s poured into the mettle bucket-dispenser it comes out at unsweetened. They’ve done this several times in the time I’ve worked there. That’s worker error. Also, many times they just don’t pay attention to which bucket they’re pouring it into. On top of that they sometimes put two different teas next to one another without marking them and end up handing out the wrong ones.
Most of it is worker error. I had no problem handing out the right teas when I worked there. I believe I only had two complaints in the year we had both the teas while I was still an employee.
I work at a McDonald’s as a cashier ( say what you want about that.
) Here’s what we do: We don’t have a COD, or customer order display, at our drive-thru. So, we mess up a little more with the order, unfortunately. But, with the sweet tea issue, that’s a usability issue with the register. With us, we’ll charge you for a large sweet tea ($1), and then “grill” the item. That is, bring up the special order interface, and add the words “NO SUGAR” to it, making it unsweet for all intents and purposes. Just some manager making the POS a little more harder than it really needs to be, I guess.
8/27/2011. What’s so hard about gettinf unsweetened ice tea. What’s in it for McDonalds? You would think that with. All the pubkic scrutiny invoilving obesity they would make an effort to NOT push the sweetened tea. .