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The Future of Dine-Out Interface Design from... Pizza Hut?

By Rain Noe - March 6, 2014

in UX

It's been over a year since we've seen interactive restaurant tables in the news, but here comes a new one from Pizza Hut. Yes, the American fast food joint is hoping that if their deep-dish pizzas aren't enough to get you inside, perhaps their fee-yancy touchscreen table will be. Have a look:

What's interesting about this, from a business perspective, is that Pizza Hut is owned by Yum! Brands, which also owns KFC and Taco Bell. While the last interactive restaurant table we looked at was integrated into a one-off restaurant, Yum! Brands (God I hate typing that stupid exclamation point in their name) has some 40,000 restaurants in over 125 countries.

As for the actual interface design (which was done by creative firm Chaotic Moon), it still seems a bit cutesy to me; I'm not confident that people will want to do a two-finger drag to choose a pie size, for instance—I suspect they'd rather just hit an S, M or L button. But the visual representation of how large something is will probably prove popular. And once the balance between what the technology can do and what people actually want has been worked out, if Y!B decides to move ahead with this concept, we could see mass uptake in a relatively short time period, on account of their size. Presumably they've got the juice to require individual franchisees to integrate these units, handily spreading the costs out.

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Moses Indigo

11 years ago

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Pizza hut = edible Poison and plastic
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supafluous

11 years ago

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I hope the pizzas come with a side of hand sanitizer
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Jamie

11 years ago

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As a child, one of the first things I associated with our local Pizza Hut was their table-top video game console. While waiting for pizza I'd beg for a quarter and play Centipede sitting down. How apropos that Pizza Hut would deliver a table-top interface for ordering.
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jamie

11 years ago

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great way of putting waitresses out of a job. Just what the economy needs!
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Bryan Johnson

11 years ago

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Pizza will still need a cleaner to wipe up and clear all of your garbage. This same individual could have just taken your order in the first place. So Pizza Hut really is not gaining much by implementing this system.
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Rob

11 years ago

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Powered by minimum wage employees
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Hank

11 years ago

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Has Pizza Hut found a replacement for their tabletop pac-man?
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David

11 years ago

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And you know it would never look like this if it was ever implemented in actual Pizza Hut locations. Not after their in-house marketing people get their greasy pizza fingers on it and brand it to death.
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Daniel Louder

11 years ago

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If I had a nickel for every blog post (this site or otherwise) that started with "The Future of..." whose concept didn't pan out, I'd have enough money to make one of these concepts real.
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