And what McDonald's understood about customer experience research before most businesses did — a practitioner's reflection on behavioural design, choice architecture, and what the world's most recognised fast food chain can teach us.
Last weekend I stopped at a McDonald's between cities — completely unplanned, just hungry and tired from driving. I ordered, found a corner, and then did something I tend to do wherever I go: I stood back and watched people.
What I noticed first was the silence. Not literal silence — the place was busy — but the absence of something I hadn't consciously missed until that moment. There was no friction. Families were gathered around the kiosks, children pointing at screens, parents scrolling through options without anybody pushing them from behind. Nobody looked tense. Nobody looked rushed.
And then I remembered the contrast. I grew up visiting McDonald's in Kyiv, where some locations had fifteen, twenty cash desks running simultaneously, and each one had a queue snaking back so far you couldn't see where it ended. I remember standing in those lines, already knowing what I wanted, already slightly irritated, watching the person at the front take too long to decide while the whole queue shifted impatiently behind them. That felt like recently. But it wasn't. And the distance between that memory and what I was watching in front of me felt enormous — not just in time, but in how much someone had clearly thought about what was actually happening to people.
Someone, at some point, had genuinely looked at what was going on. And then done something about it.
That is what this article is about. Not technology. Not kiosks. But what happens when a business genuinely studies its customers' behaviour — and then has the courage to redesign around what it finds.
On the surface, the old McDonald's queue looked like a logistical issue. Too many customers, not enough cashiers — the obvious solution being more staff or faster service. That is how most businesses frame it when they see long lines: a question of volume and throughput.
But research into consumer behaviour under time pressure tells a more uncomfortable story. In psychology, time pressure is defined as a subjective state in which individuals feel constrained by time, producing emotional reactions including anxiety, nervousness, and discomfort. These aren't minor background feelings — they actively change how people process information and make decisions. Research on what has been called the "hassled decision maker" effect shows that people under time pressure generate fewer alternatives, consider fewer consequences, and narrow their thinking significantly.
In a fast food context, this means the person standing in a queue, aware of the line building behind them, is not browsing. They are not considering options, they are not making a satisfying choice. They are escaping. They order the thing they always order, or the first thing that comes to mind, because the environment around them has made any other behaviour feel like an imposition on everyone watching. Studies on retail time pressure confirm that time-pressed consumers browse less, rely more on habitual shortcuts, and focus on finishing rather than choosing well.
This matters for two reasons. For the customer, the experience is quietly stressful in a way they may not even consciously name — they just leave feeling vaguely neutral, and they don't quite know why. For the business, it means a significant amount of potential revenue is sitting untouched, because people are ordering less than they would if they simply felt comfortable enough to look around.
The queue looked like an operations problem. Underneath it was something to do with how people feel when they don't have control over their own time.
Research consistently shows that time pressure narrows thinking, reduces the number of alternatives a person considers, and pushes them toward habitual rather than satisfying choices.
Source: Mann & Tan (1993), "The Hassled Decision Maker," Australian Journal of Management; Emerald Publishing / Spanish Journal of Marketing (2026), "Time pressure and shopping behaviour in retailing."
The kiosks didn't come from an IT department proposing digital transformation. They came from research. McDonald's partnered with a research consultancy to map the full customer journey across every stage — pre-visit, during the visit, and post-visit — understanding customers' motivations and needs on both a functional and emotional level. They then used quantitative validation to identify and prioritise the pain points that were most commonly experienced and least addressed by the brand.
What that research surfaced was not "customers want technology." It was something more human than that: customers wanted control over their own time. They wanted to browse without pressure, customise without embarrassment, and make decisions without a stranger watching them from behind. The kiosk gave customers full control over their own browsing and ordering pace, and that feeling of control is what reduced interaction anxiety — not the screen itself.
The commercial outcome followed naturally from that. McDonald's own data consistently showed that customers tended to order more through kiosks than through a cashier — not because of upselling prompts, but because of the psychological effect of being in control of their own pace. The company had been testing this since 2003, and the pattern held across every trial.
What I find most telling about the UK rollout, though, is what happened to staff. Rather than reducing headcount, the kiosk implementation freed staff from behind the counter and redirected them to the restaurant floor — helping customers, maintaining the environment, and offering table service. For families with young children, or customers needing additional help, this turned out to be a genuine improvement to the experience.
The technology was the output. The insight about how people actually behave was the input. Most businesses, in my experience, do this the other way around — they invest in the solution before they have properly understood the problem.
The kiosk rollout was not primarily a technology investment — it was the commercial result of properly understanding what was frustrating customers at the point of ordering.
Figures are reported, not independently audited. Presented as "reported" per source guidance.
Source: THRIVE Thinking (2018), "McDonald's Experience of the Future — Global Customer Insights Research"; EZ-Chow (2024), "How McDonald's Self-Service Kiosks Changed the Customer Experience Game."
"The technology was the output. The insight about how people actually behave was the input."
There is a lot of analysis available about the UI and UX of the world's most popular digital platforms — but comparatively little attention is paid to the choice architecture embedded in physical service environments and in-store customer journeys.
Despite the crucial interaction between people and their physical environments, there is still limited research showing how architectural and environmental elements affect behaviour and decision-making in the consumer domain. We have spent years refining the placement of buttons on screens, the colour of call-to-action elements, and the number of steps in a digital checkout flow. Meanwhile, the physical spaces where customers actually make decisions — the retail floor, the waiting room, the service counter, the boarding gate — are largely still designed on instinct, convention, and what has always been done.
The irony is that these physical touchpoints often carry more emotional weight than their digital equivalents. A frustrating experience in a fitting room, an unexplained wait in a hospital corridor, a chaotic boarding process at an airport gate — these stay with people in a way that a slow-loading webpage rarely does. And yet almost nobody is studying them with the same rigour.
— and where most businesses have their own unexamined queue
McDonald's is unusual in one respect: they had the resources to conduct global customer research over decades before acting. Most organisations don't have that. But the underlying question they were trying to answer is one that any business can ask: where in our service journey are we accidentally making people feel rushed, confused, or unheard — and what is that costing us?
In most cases, when I start looking, the answer turns up somewhere specific and familiar.
Zara stores are typically packed, with long queues for fitting rooms and even longer ones to make a purchase or process a return. The fitting room itself is a well-documented failure point in the service journey: two small hooks that can barely hold one coat, let alone eight items to try on. A floor that is visibly dusty or dirty — so you end up holding everything off the ground rather than focusing on whether the clothes fit. Lighting that is rarely flattering and often harsh. And no easy way to request a different size without leaving the cubicle, getting dressed again, and rejoining the queue you just waited in.
Research into this experience found that the most common frustration was having to leave the fitting room area to exchange sizes, forcing customers to go through the whole process again — something the majority described as a waste of time that reduced their willingness to buy anything at all. The item goes back on the rail. The customer leaves. The sale is lost. And nobody has connected that loss to the two small hooks and the dirty floor that caused it.
Primark faces a similar challenge at a different scale. Enormous footfall through stores where the checkout experience, at peak hours, is genuinely hard to navigate for anyone who hasn't been there before. You don't know where the queue starts, how long it will take, or whether you're standing in the right place. For a retailer whose whole offer is built around accessible, low-friction shopping, that moment often contradicts everything the brand is promising.
These situations have something in common: the data about them exists — it shows up in abandonment rates, return figures, drop-off at checkout — but it is not connected to the specific moments in the service journey that produce it. That connection is what customer journey mapping and behavioural research are designed to make visible.
Long queues, inefficient boarding processes, and poor communication at the gate are among the most consistently cited sources of passenger frustration, cumulatively accounting for close to 70% of all negative airline feedback. What makes aviation a useful case to think about is that the problems are almost never about the flight itself. They are about everything surrounding it — the check-in experience, what gets communicated at the gate, the boarding sequence, the way staff behave when something goes wrong and passengers have no information and nowhere to go.
Research on service failure in air travel shows that the emotional response to a problem — whether it becomes worry, frustration, or anger — determines what the passenger does next. Anger, specifically, is associated not just with complaints but with switching to another airline and telling other people about it. Airlines understand this intellectually. What they often lack is a way of observing where in the physical journey those emotional responses are actually being triggered, and what a different approach at that moment might look like.
Most airline investment goes into the in-flight product. Most passenger frustration comes from the service journey around it.
Figures are approximate and based on category groupings from published analysis. Presented as "approximately" per source guidance.
Source: TNMT (2023), "A new deep dive into passenger frustration with airlines."
Part of my earlier career was spent working on the design and evaluation of public-facing administrative services, where the central challenge was the same one NHS services face today: how do you make a service that people have no choice but to use feel like it respects their time?
NHS patient feedback consistently identifies waiting, communication about what is happening, and staff behaviour as the dominant concerns — not clinical outcomes, but the experience of moving through the service itself. A patient waiting in a hospital corridor for two hours is not simply waiting. They are in a state of uncertainty, without information, without any sense of control, in a physical environment that often offers no meaningful signal about what comes next or why the delay is happening. That experience is shaped entirely by how the service journey around them has been designed — and in most cases, it has never been treated as a design question at all.
The GP appointment that runs late without any explanation. The council website that requires three separate logins to complete one form. The outpatient letter that arrives after the appointment it was confirming. These are not random failures — they are patterns that appear consistently once you start looking for them, and they are far more fixable than they appear.
In every sector I have worked in, there is a moment in the service journey — sometimes several — where the customer is essentially back in the old McDonald's queue. They feel the time pressure, they lose the sense of control, they don't know what is coming next, and the service around them was clearly designed for something other than their experience of it.
The organisations that find those moments, understand why they happen, and redesign around actual human behaviour are the ones that end up with the loyalty figures, the recommendation rates, and the revenue that their competitors are measuring but cannot account for. And the work it takes to get there is not speculative — it is well established. It begins with going into the service and observing what actually happens: through in-store observation, in-depth interviews, customer journey mapping, and the kind of research that connects what people say with what they actually do.
That is the work I do with clients at Oleksa Insights. If you recognise your own service in any of what I have described above, that is usually where the most useful conversation begins.
Oleksandra Baklanova is the founder of Oleksa Insights, a research and CX consultancy working across consumer, retail, public sector, and service industries. If you would like to discuss a specific service challenge, you are welcome to get in touch.
If any of this resonated with how customers move through your service, the most useful conversation usually starts with going to look.