Best practices

After the inital trial phases and use by other early adopters, below are a list of learnings/best practices that we’d suggest to get the most from your use of Self-Service:

• Register your barcoded products: As much as possible, any items that are packaged and contain a printed barcode, these should be registered against the relevant PLU. Doing this, means that users can simply scan these items and you don’t need to add them to the layout, reducing clutter making it easier and quicker for users to find the non-barcoded items.
• When setting up layouts, group the items by category: Think about it from a users perspective, it is easier to locate the item you’re looking for when the menus are categorised. For example, a ‘Sausage roll’ PLU may be more suited in a menu named ‘Hot snacks’ versus a menu called ‘Break’. Additionally, there is nothing stopping you adding the same item to multiple menus if it makes sense to do so.
• Use sensible product naming convention/Use suitable PLU display names: Items on the Self-Service checkout are automatically sorted in alphabetical order, reducing back office administration and making it easier for users to locate the relevant items. To facilitate this, consider using sensible, easy to read PLU names, or if you can’t/don’t want to change the full PLU name, you can set a display name which will be used on the kiosk. For example, if you have an item called ‘Small Pizza’, a student would instinctively look for items beginning with P rather than S. Therefore, changing this to ‘Pizza – Small’ will make this item easier to locate.
• Use photos on all products: When products have an image assigned to them, users no longer need to skim read all the products on the layout, as the image will be more quickly recognisable. To make the items even more recognisable, we suggest taking your own photos of your food items, however your images can be sourced from elsewhere and we even have a collection of 2D “clipart style” images which can be used.
• Use the available times: In Fusion v25.4, we added the ability to make items show on the kiosk only during certain times. As it is assumed that users will only be adding the items to the transaction that are on their tray, showing breakfast items at lunch time isn’t necessarily an issue, however by using the available times, you can drastically reduce clutter, again making it easier for users to locate the correct items.
• Consider using lead throughs: Also added in v25.4 is the ability to add a lead-through. Lead-throughs can guide users through purchasing more complex meals, for example, if a user has a meal which consists of a main item, side-dish, vegetables, and a drink which are all priced individually, rather than having all these items on the layout, you could have a single ‘Main meal’ button with a stage for mains, a stage for side-dishes etc. with the relevant items in each stage. When selected on the kiosk, a lead through guides the user through each stage. Additionally, a lead through doesn’t have to include multiple stages, you could simply use one to consolidate multiple items together. For example, if you offer 4 different flavours of milkshakes, you could have a single ‘Milkshake’ lead through with a single stage of ‘Flavour’ that you add the individual flavours to.
• Register supervisors/operators cards: Registering a card against supervisor/operator logins will provide quicker, more secure access to operator functions than entering a PIN each time. Note: This will require that a card reader is installed inside the kiosk.