App Restaurante
Designing for a kitchen mid-rush
- Restaurant
- Operations
- Client
- McDonald's
- Year
- 2014
- Discipline
- Design
- Role
- Product Designer
What I did
- End-to-end design of the restaurant-side ordering app
- Order lifecycle model: one object tracked from received through to delivered
- Queue design for a screen read at a distance, mid-rush, without touching it
- State and escalation design for orders running late
Built at Clube da Entrega for McDonald’s, App Restaurante is the restaurant’s side of the delivery operation: the screen the kitchen works from when orders are arriving faster than they can be cooked.
The problem
Delivery adds a second, invisible queue to a kitchen that already has one. The counter queue is self-regulating, because the person waiting is standing right there. The delivery queue is not: the customer is a name on a screen, and the cost of an order slipping is paid twenty minutes later by someone else.
At the busiest hours, that produced the failures that matter:
- No single view of the order. Received, accepted, in the kitchen, ready, collected — each state lived in someone’s head or on paper.
- The urgent order looks like every other order. A list sorted by arrival gives no signal about which one is about to be late.
- The kitchen cannot stop to read. Hands are full, the screen is across the room, and attention comes in two-second slices.
What I did
The design treated the app as an operational instrument, not an inbox.
One order, one lifecycle. Every order is a single object carrying its whole history from receipt to delivery, so the state is never reconstructed from memory and the app can answer “where is it” at any moment.
The queue sorts by urgency, not arrival. What the kitchen needs is not a chronological log but an answer to “what next”, which means time remaining has to outrank time received.
Legible across the room. Type, contrast and target sizes were set for a screen glanced at from a few metres away by someone holding something in both hands, not for a phone held at reading distance.