One kiosk, designed to become many.
Cyntra sells BREEZ as a service: a business signs up and gets a kiosk, the software and the hardware together. I joined Cyntra in 2023 and spent about six months as the only designer on the kiosk screens. I worked with a product manager and the developers, and testers ran the flows before each release.
The first job was food ordering. It didn't stay the only one. The same screens went on to carry retail checkout and then entry ticketing, and each new client wanted the kiosk to look like their brand, not like Cyntra's. So the real brief, which became clear as the clients arrived, was a foundation: a layout and a set of components that could take a new job or a new brand without being redesigned.
A tall screen, a standing customer and a receipt.
Every BREEZ installation shipped on the same hardware, the Sunmi K2: a 23.8-inch Full HD touchscreen on a tall stand, with a built-in 80 mm receipt printer. Designing for one fixed device is a gift and a constraint. There's no responsive layout to worry about, but every decision has to work for someone standing at arm's length, often in a queue, often in a hurry.
Read at arm's length, not at reading distance
A kiosk is used standing up. Item names, prices and the total have to read from a step back, and the next action has to be obvious without anyone explaining it.
Fingers, not cursors
A capacitive touchscreen used by strangers means big, forgiving targets and nothing that depends on hover. Every tap needs a visible response, because there's no one at the counter to ask whether it worked.
The printer is part of the interface
The paper receipt is what the customer carries to the counter or the gate. The order number on screen and the receipt in hand have to agree, so the last screen and the printout were designed together.
Nobody is there to help
Self-service only works if the screen does the job a cashier would. When the kiosk sits idle, it has to invite people in. When something goes wrong, the screen has to say what to do next.
Three kinds of customer, and none of them signed up for anything.
What they share matters more than what separates them. None of them installed an app or created an account, and none of them will read instructions. Each one gives the kiosk a few seconds of attention before deciding whether it's easier than the counter. The design had to win those few seconds every time.
Every kiosk takes orders. Ours had to make people feel something.
Self-ordering kiosks weren't new. Plenty of products already let you browse a menu, pay and get a receipt, and on features alone BREEZ would have been one more. The design problem was differentiation, and the answer we chose was gamification: making the kiosk feel rewarding, not just efficient.
A customer may never consciously notice it, but a moment of celebration when the order goes through gives a small, happy signal. That signal is what makes them pick the kiosk over the counter next time.
Two ways the kiosk rewards people
- →Coupons, in plain sight. Available coupons are surfaced while the customer orders, not hidden behind a code field at checkout. A discount the customer can see is a reason to use the kiosk; a discount they have to know about isn't.
- →Confetti on success. A successful payment and a placed order each end in a burst of confetti. It costs the customer nothing, it never slows them down, and it turns the last screen of a transaction into a small celebration rather than a dead end.
The restraint mattered as much as the idea. Gamification on a kiosk can easily become noise: spinning wheels, pop-ups, things between a hungry customer and their food. Here, the reward comes at the two moments where a customer has already done the work, never in the way of it.
Food, checkout, tickets: the same walk-up, choose, pay.
Food ordering came first, and it set the shape every later job followed. Retail checkout and ticketing were adopted on top of it rather than designed from scratch. That only worked because the three jobs share the same backbone: choose something, review it, pay, and walk away with proof.
- 01 Walk up An idle screen that invites a tap Tap to start
- 02 Choose Items, products or tickets, with coupons in view FoodRetailTickets
- 03 Review & pay A clear total before any money moves Apply couponPay
- 04 Celebrate Confetti, an order number, and a printed receipt Receipt printed
Keeping the spine identical paid off twice. A customer who learns one BREEZ kiosk can use the next, whatever it sells. And when a new kind of client arrived, the work was swapping what goes in step 02, not rebuilding the journey.
Same layout, same components, their colours.
The part that travelled between clients was the layout and the components. What changed was colour. Each brand's palette was mapped onto the same screens, so the kiosk felt like part of their store rather than a third-party machine parked in it.
Decathlon's kiosk took the brand's blue and yellow. INA Dilli Haat took Indian colours, brick red and orange, to sit inside a market built around Indian crafts and food. Food brands took their own colours, orange for one. Underneath, the grid, the cards, the coupon banner, the pay bar and the success moment stayed exactly where customers expected them.
Still taking orders, in two countries.
The kiosk system is live today. Visitors at INA Dilli Haat use it to book entry tickets, and in the USA it runs at food stalls including Dosa Adige. The foundation I designed was also adapted for Decathlon. These are three very different businesses (a craft and food market, a food brand and a global sports retailer) running on one set of screens.
What I'd do differently now
- →Turn the colour swap into real tokens. Re-skinning worked by changing colours screen by screen. After UX4G, I'd define semantic tokens (brand, on-brand, surface, success) so a new client is a palette file, not a design pass.
- →Check every brand palette for contrast. Brand colours aren't chosen for accessibility. Yellow on white or orange text on cream can fail at a glance from arm's length. I'd test each palette before it ships and adjust the shades used for text.
- →Design the unhappy paths as carefully as the confetti. Payment declined, printer out of paper, a customer who walks away mid-order. The kiosk will meet all of these, and they deserve the same care as the success moment.
What I'd keep
Designing a foundation instead of a screen. BREEZ is the first time I saw a layout I'd made carry businesses I'd never designed for. It's the same instinct that later shaped my work on UX4G: build the parts so someone else can use them well.