Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering). As for app vs webs…
How economical is your local Taco Bell?
151–160 of 356 posts
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#152Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#153For the umpteen millionth time, please please please do not use red/green for the scale, it is very difficult for colorblind people to distinguish, which is ~5% of the male population. Look at Colorbrewer for some alternative suggestions: https://colorbrewer2.org/
Do operating system accessibility controls help you distinguish the colors? For example, both Windows 10/11 and MacOS have "color filters". https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/ windows/use-color-filters-in-windows-43893e44 b8b3-2e27-1a29-b0c15ef0e5ce https://support.apple.com/ guide/mac-help/change-display-colors-easier-onscreen mchl11ddd4b3/mac
The core problem is that many (r,g) pairs are equivalent, or nearly so. It's worth noting then that at least one of two properties holds:
(a) Your mapping is bijective. You shift things around, e.g. by swapping the green and blue channels. Any bijective technique other than the identity will, by definition, add hue distortion, making things potentially hard to interpret. You're able to, e.g., gain the ability to distinguish red and green, but that comes at the cost of not being able to distinguish red and blue, since the confused pairs still exist in the output space.
(b) Your mapping isn't injective. Many input colors map to the same output colors. One way this might be helpful is in pushing the (r,g) split toward its extremes. Maybe leave (50,50) alone, map (40,60) -> (10,90) and (30,70) -> (1,99). How much that helps varies [0], but it comes at the cost of reduced dynamic range. You traded telling colors apart for telling images with subtle variations apart. And, again, there's a hue distortion.
If we don't have any good options, what levers do you have available to play with?
1. You can (ab)use the brightness channel to carry color information. This isn't very effective since brightness steps are harder to perceive than hue steps. Most implementations will instead prefer to keep the perceptual brightness the same (for the particular colorblindness described, reds will be less bright than in normal vision and greens more bright, so you need to add a correction factor). In the abstract, I do like using the brightness channel. When out at sea I'll wear strongly tinted orange sunglasses to make detecting buoys easy (everything else is dark, but the orange buoys are bright as day).
2. You can compress the (r,g) split as described above, making reds more red and greens more green.
3. You use the blue channel somehow. This is a catch-all of sorts, but if you're keeping brightness the same and not fixing the problem with just (r,g) (and, again, people want to keep brightness the same and can't fix the problem with just (r,g) [0]), then you're mixing blue into the equation. With a goal of minimizing hue distortion, no implementation does anything as extreme as my proposal of swapping the blue and green channels. They all, instead, trade some of the (r,g) discriminative ability for extra blue. Implementation details vary. I particularly like the ones which have a sequence of tests and do a little ML to come up with a nice (r,g,b) -> (r,g,b) scheme tailored for your eyes. However it's done though, you're saturating the blue channel with extra information.
All mappings can be represented as some combination of (1,2,3), and mostly (3) in practice, which perhaps helps explain why the techniques aren't amazing in general. They all assume the goal is telling red from green, but your real goal is telling apart all the colors you need to tell apart in whichever UI you happen to be working with. The extra constraint of minimizing hue distortion helps with that, but you're still in a world where the colorblind filter helps for some UIs and doesn't for others, actively making others worse. God-forbid they have both off-red and off-blue buttons when the filter's solution was trading some red for some blue.
And you can work around that a bit by not letting the filter be quite so strong, but that comes at the cost of not being as helpful in the actual red-green case. It's one more lever that helps a bit at the OS level. You'd really like customization for the particular UI you're looking at, kind of like what user style sheets were supposed to do for the web.
[0] You don't really get "pure" colors from an LCD, so this is even less effective of a technique than it could be, and it really messes with the math (you want something kind of like an integral over relative response curves convolved with the LCD's spectrum). The particular flavor of red-green colorblindness described though, you can sometimes tell very pure reds from very pure greens.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering). As for app vs webs…
I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
The app makes it so your food is ready soon after you arrive. You can spend all the time browsing the menu and ordering before arriving at the physical location and then the food is already prepared or is made upon your arrival. Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to nat…
In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot.
As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances.
There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
What proportion of Americans are traveling from one job site to the next? Surely, the vast majority are coming home every day, and the vast majority of those presumably have a kitchen.
The word "surely" is doing a lot of work for you. It sounds like you're arguing that the lived experience of an itinerant construction worker doesn't matter in your quest to ensure everyone cooks all of their meals from healthy fruits and vegetables no matter how much grind it takes to accomplish. That's probably not the best way to address GP's concerns. I once had to wait out a lease and commute an hour and a half…
> Not sure if you've been to the USA but it's not like many Americans have a choice.
A small portion of Americans, such as itinerant construction workers or people with 90 minute one way commutes, might not have a choice, but to say “many Americans” don’t have the option to make simple lentil/rice/vegetable/etc meals is not correct in the sense that much of the restaurant business exists due to necessity rather than desire.
The vast, vast majority of decisions to eat at restaurants are made out of convenience or preference, not time or money constraints.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the restaurant profitable. (Land cost is the other big expense.)
None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#158They are missing the Seattle Lower Queen Anne Taco Bell/KFC combo store that is known to be the most expensive Taco Bell in the nation. https://locations.tacobell.com/wa/seattle/210-w--mercer-st-.... Anyways, you hear horror pricing stories about this one store.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine they let you order food and then when you arrive your food is already made?
Essentially yes, except they make it when you arrive (at least if you pick up in the drive through). This is good design, because food from Taco Bell has an expiration date of about 3 minutes after it's cooked. It's good (well, not good, but it's food) right when it comes out, but once it cools down a bit it becomes essentially inedible.
Re: How economical is your local Taco Bell?
#160They are missing the Seattle Lower Queen Anne Taco Bell/KFC combo store that is known to be the most expensive Taco Bell in the nation. https://locations.tacobell.com/wa/seattle/210-w--mercer-st-.... Anyways, you hear horror pricing stories about this one store.