After a few weeks of closing for renovation, can.teen (odd spelling which I wasn’t aware of) at the IFC is open again.
can.teen is basically an upscale version of Maxim Fast Food. Food was so-so, but cheapest in this building complex. I am a regular customer as it is convenient. Pay, grab you food and be off in no time, or that’s the idea in theory. In practice, can.teen had the most oddball design of any fast food place I have come across. There used to be about 5 different queues there during lunch hours, and it was totally confusing. They had to put a drone in the hall to peek at your food ticket and guide you to the right queue. Absolute chaos. Good thing they decided to renovate.
How the queuing works remains to be seen. However the first thing that striked me was the food menu in the hall, which is 4 big colour display panels setup in portrait mode. The initial impression is, technology for the sake of it. I am not convinced at this stage that this high tech menu adds anything to the eating place. There seems to be many usability problems, which I plan to write about.
I’ll have to take a few shots of the menu and maybe a short movie clip first. The problem is, I suspect the drones will try to stop me, taking me as an industrial spy or worse, a terrorist.
Update (13/7): Turned out that the change is in appearance only. The same old frustrating 5 different queues. Those panels appear to be made by LG (an article on these commercial panels in today’s HKET). The menu isn’t real-time, i.e. sold out items do not disappear. One of the panels keeps flashing, causing a big distraction. The words are too small, and of course doesn’t beat the resolution of traditional printing, and are hard to read. The programmer of this menu didn’t have a clue about usability.
They did try to solve the problem w/ queue confusion: by throwing two more drones into the hall.
They also change the packaging. The plastic bag is of really good quality. A bit of a waste IMO.
.jpg "Plastic bags from can.teen")