Vending/Kiosk Experience — designing an accessible touch interface for industrial environments, PPE, and non-English-speaking staff
The KeepStock vending application was originally built by an engineering team without UX input, leaving a diverse workforce — including non-English speakers, workers wearing PPE, and users in loud, poorly lit industrial environments — struggling with an interface that wasn’t designed for them, their devices, or their conditions.
The original vending application was built by an engineering team without UX input, so it carried office-software assumptions into a factory-floor context — assumptions that didn't survive contact with the actual users.
Ride-alongs and direct observation of the vending devices in industrial conditions surfaced problems that would never show up in a typical office-based usability test: PPE gloves not registering on touchscreens, ambient noise drowning out audio cues, and login flows assuming reliable literacy in English.
I established six guiding principles — accessible, consistent, guided, environment-aware, minimal steps, and device-appropriate — and used them to evaluate every redesigned flow, ensuring the rebuilt interface matched the conditions it would actually be used in, not the conditions it was designed in.
Signed off by engineering leadership as production-ready across all vending device touchpoints