A customer-facing POS kiosk for restaurants — arm's-length tap targets, variable lighting, high cognitive load. The dark mode I shipped here as an accessibility call became Aero's system-wide standard.
A kiosk isn't a phone. The user is standing up, often in motion, sometimes with kids or bags, in a restaurant with variable noise and lighting. The device is fixed — the user can't reposition it. Tap targets at arm's length are a fundamentally different problem than mobile.
This was my first kiosk project. The constraints were physical, not just interaction-design challenges — I had to design for a specific body distance, a specific device size, and an environment that actively works against focus.
[ Fill in: The specific product scope. What Counter App was for, what Loyalty added, how they were connected. What success looked like for the business. ]
Can't be tilted, moved, or held. Every layout decision is for one viewing angle, one distance.
Restaurants range from bright fast-casual to dim fine dining. Contrast and legibility can't be assumed.
Users are deciding what to order, reading prices, interacting with staff. The UI has to be instantly clear.
Before a customer walks up, the kiosk is showing something: a menu, promotions, brand content. This is Phase 1 — the idle state. It has to work at distance, function as ambient display, and transition into the active flow without disorienting the user.
[ Fill in: The specific design decisions for Phase 1. What you showed on the passive screen, how you handled brand requirements, what the transition into Phase 2 looked like. ]
[ Fill in: What the key challenges were here and how you solved them. ]
[ Fill in: The Phase 2 flow in order. How you handled the itemized order view, tipping (the most fraught UX in POS), signature, and loyalty sign-up as a post-payment moment. ]
[ Fill in: How you handled touch targets at arm's length. What the minimum sizes were, how you validated them, what you had to override from standard Aero specs. ]
[ Fill in: Payment errors, failed loyalty lookups, timeout states. How you designed for the restaurant staff's perspective as much as the customer's. ]
I shipped dark mode on this project not as a preference, but as the right answer for the environment. Restaurant lighting is unpredictable. Dark mode reduces glare in dim settings, improves contrast in ambient light, and is easier on the eyes in high-ambient-noise environments where cognitive load is already high.
It was an accessibility argument, not an aesthetic one — and it worked. The patterns I established here became the foundational reference for Aero-wide dark mode.
[ Fill in: The specific design decisions that made the dark mode work. Color token adjustments, contrast ratios, what you had to rethink from the light-mode baseline. What "translating" to dark mode revealed about the system's assumptions. ]
[ Fill in: The business impact of the shipped product. Metrics if available — adoption, loyalty sign-up rate, transaction speed, customer satisfaction. ]
[ Fill in: The system-level impact — how the dark mode patterns propagated into Aero. What other kiosk projects used as their reference. What this project revealed about gaps in Aero's accessibility documentation. ]
Let's talk