McDonald’s launches new automated restaurant concept designed by UXUS

Design studio UXUS has collaborated with long-standing client McDonald’s on a restaurant designed around a new service proposition which looks to meet the changing habits of its customers.

The small-format test restaurant has several new features designed to provide McDonald’s digital customers further convenience when using the Drive Thru, pick-up and delivery services. An additional Order Ahead Lane in the Drive Thru will let customers who ordered on the app skip the queue before arriving at a food and beverage conveyer belt window.

There will also be a dedicated room and parking spaces for delivery couriers in a bid to create “a more streamlined experience for couriers, and less disruption for crew and customers”, according to McDonald’s senior director of global design and restaurant development Max Carmona.

There will also be an in-restaurant pick-up shelf for click and collect customers, self-order kiosks that accept both cash and credit, and curbside pick-up parking spots for quicker access to waiting vehicles. Carmona says that Texas was chosen for the test restaurant because of the “support of a strong market in the location”.

Alongside app updates, many of these new physical features are aimed at app users, providing an “innovative, seamless experience” from order to pick up, says Carmona. He explains how the new facilities will allow restaurant teams to prepare mobile orders when customers are close to the restaurant and “automate the check-in process” when they arrive at the restaurant, “making it faster and more convenient” for app users.

The food and beverage conveyer and new kitchen format also aim to “streamline operations” and help to “manage the multitude of ways customer orders come into the restaurant”, he adds.

UXUS CCO and founder George Gottl says the studio worked closely with the McDonalds team on all of the projects design components, such as the interior design and façade architecture. Gottl says that smaller touchpoints, such as “clever graphic phrases and intuitive wayfinding” seek to differentiate the experience and make it feel “elevated”.

In a departure from a regular McDonald’s site the building’s architecture takes “a modern approach to the graphics on the façade” by deconstructing the restaurants recognisable golden arches. He adds that these “intuitive design elements” – inside and out – work by amplifying the restaurant’s new digital offer.

Based on initial testing, McDonald’s anticipates that the new restaurant format will require a similar number of staff to a traditional store based on initial testing.

Next steps will involve “continuously testing and learning” from these new concepts and technologies to improve customers’ digital experience, says Carmona. For now, the concept restaurant will remain solely in the Texas location but it could potentially roll out to in part or in full around the world, according to Carmona.