kiosk checkout flow

I designed a tablet based payment experience for a shared B2B ordering kiosk, where checkout is a high-pressure moment (queues, shared device, hardware/network friction).

My focus was making payment feel calm, obvious, and recoverable including failure states (declines, retries, cancellations) as first-class flows.

I delivered a payment-ready checkout moment within the ordering journey: review → choose method → card-present instruction → success/failure recovery → operational handoff.

I aligned quickly with product and engineering on device constraints and key edge cases, audited the current flow for confusion and dead ends, and scanned comparable kiosk patterns for card-present, declines, and recovery.

Key insights:

A few insights shaped the solution. The biggest one was that uncertainty drives drop-off, especially the question ‘Was I charged?’. Another was that card-present moments need the UI to be quieter and more signage-like, because users are physically interacting with the reader, not reading lots of interface text. And because it’s a shared device, mistakes are more likely, so recovery paths need to feel very safe and clear.

Design principles derived from insights:

I built the flow around three principles: unmissable status, one dominant action per step, and humane recovery with clear exits. In practice, that meant every screen had to answer three questions very quickly: what’s happening, what do I do now, and what happens next.