How Korea & Japan Turned Ordering Food into a UX Masterclass

In Western markets, kiosks are still largely a chain-restaurant thing. You'll find them at McDonald's, Burger King, and airport food courts. But walk into an independent café in London or a restaurant in Melbourne, and you're still handed a laminated sheet of text (no photos, no translations) and expected to figure it out.

The main reason for kiosks in the west is cost-saving for larger franchises. But in Korea and Japan, even the smallest businesses have gone digital. A four-table ramen shop in Tokyo. A mom-and-pop gimbap spot in Seoul. A standing soba counter in Sapporo. All with screens.

In these countries, they’ve realized that digital works better. But the way they have implemented it is surprisingly different.

Let’s take a look at how Korea & Japan approach the everyday design challenge of ordering food.

Korea's relationship with kiosks makes perfect sense once you understand Korean digital culture. This is a country where super-apps like KakaoTalk or NAVER handle everything from messaging to payments to taxi bookings.

Removing friction isn't a feature here — it's a baseline expectation. Kiosks reflect exactly that.

Walk into almost any Korean restaurant (chain or independent) and the kiosk is your first interaction. Often, not even an option alongside a human cashier but the only way to order. You browse the menu with photos, customize your order, and pay on the spot. By the time you're settled, your order is already in the kitchen.

Order and pay in one flow. No separate checkout, no "I'll bring the bill when you're done." You handle it upfront, sit down, and your food arrives. For a tourist who doesn't speak Korean this is genuinely useful — the screen usually offers Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese, one tap to switch. Even without switching language, the flow is intuitive. Familiar icons, primary action always in the same position, photos doing the describing. You rarely need to read a single word.

The thing that surprised me most wasn't seeing kiosks at Lotteria or McDonald's. It was the tiny gimbap place around the corner from my Airbnb. The 10-seat cafe. The bakery downstairs. Small businesses have invested in this just as much as the big chains — probably more, since there's no staff to fall back on.

There's a reason small businesses can afford this. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups runs the Smart Store Technology Program, covering kiosk and table tablet installation — up to ₩5,000,000 (~$3,400 USD, ~$4,900 AUD) per store, with the government covering 50–80% of the cost depending on the business type. The gimbap place around the corner didn't fund that kiosk alone.

In sit-down restaurants the kiosk is often replaced by a tablet on the table. Same logic: browse, order, and pay from your seat. Some places combine both — kiosk at the door for takeaway, tablet at the table for dine-in. Payment is always part of the flow. No flagging down staff, no waiting for the bill.

A study from the KDI School of Public Policy and Management looked at what kiosks actually do to restaurant workforces in Korea. Unskilled part-time workers saw lower wages and fewer hours, and family-run restaurants reduced their reliance on unpaid family help. But skilled full-time staff in independent restaurants saw better wages. Less a story of jobs lost, more a reallocation of labor toward roles that require more skill.

Technology isn't deployed to eliminate the human — it's deployed to elevate what the human does.

Japan's self-ordering setup looks different depending on where you eat. Larger chains (like Matsuya, Yoshinoya) use standing kiosks at the entrance, similar to Korea. But smaller restaurants, izakayas, neighbourhood spots usually have a tablet on the table instead.

The software feels less Western than Korea's and interfaces are less polished, but the overall experience is warmer and, for tourists, surprisingly flexible in ways Korea isn't.

Japan is also a country where you can buy a hot can of coffee from a vending machine at 3am on a mountain road. Self-service UX has been part of daily life here for a long time.

You'll still find the older Ticket Vending Machine (食券機, shokukenki) in traditional ramen and soba shops. These are the forerunners of the modern kiosk. Make your choice before entering the restaurant, insert cash, press a button, and collect a paper ticket to hand to the chef. Charming, and very Japan. (LIVE.JAPAN)

Let’s get back to the modern day. The typical ordering experience you will encounter in Japan is the table tablet.

Smaller restaurants like izakayas, curry spots, noodle shops almost always have one on the table. You sit down, browse at your own pace, order in rounds. The food arrives without you having to catch anyone's eye.

This fits how the meal actually works. In izakaya culture, small dishes called sakana arrive throughout the evening a few at a time, with a final dish called shime to close things out. Ordering everything upfront at an entrance kiosk would make no sense. The table tablet is the only device that actually fits this dining format.

The key difference from Korea: in Japan, the tablet handles ordering only. Payment happens at the counter when you leave, or a staff member brings the bill. More relaxed, more human — and for tourists, more flexible than you'd expect.

Korean kiosks and tablets are more modern, the software is more Western, and the end-to-end flow is simpler. But many only accept physical cards (no Apple Pay, no contactless). At a Japanese counter, a person handles the transaction and it can be more flexible.

Yes, Japan serves your food before you've paid. You order, eat, then settle up. Korea does the opposite: pay upfront, eat, leave whenever you want, no waiting for the bill while three other tables are also trying to leave at the same time. Pure efficiency.

Personally I prefer paying upfront — no surprises, no card issues, no awkward moment at the end.

Japan has been funding this too, with a different goal in mind. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government subsidy covers up to half the cost of multilingual tablets, cashless payment devices and translated menus — up to ¥3,000,000 (~$18,300 USD, ~$26,300 AUD) per restaurant — as part of its inbound tourism strategy.

And it goes beyond restaurants. After Tokyo won the 2020 Olympics bid in 2013, multilingual support was pushed across transport and public facilities too. One Shinjuku taxi company used the same family of subsidies to install tablets with real-time translation in seven languages — the passenger speaks into a rear-seat tablet, the driver sees Japanese subtitles. Payment by card, transit IC or QR code, right from the back seat.

Korea and Japan use the same hardware — but who uses what, when, and how payment works tells you a lot about the culture behind them.

🇰🇷 Korea: standard across all restaurant sizes, chains and independents alike. Order and pay in one flow, card payments (though often physical cards only, no Apple Pay or contactless). The hardware is slim — thin screens that fit even the smallest entryways.

🇯🇵 Japan: mainly larger chains like Matsuya and Yoshinoya. Same concept as Korea but less Western software and interfaces — and bulkier machines that take up noticeably more space, partly because they still handle coins and cash, and print paper tickets you hand over to get your food.

🇰🇷 Korea: used widely across all sizes, often alongside or instead of a kiosk. Order and pay from your seat — same payment flow, same card limitation. Tablets are ususally fixed to the table: you can angle them toward you, that's about it.

🇯🇵 Japan: the go-to device for smaller and independent restaurants — izakayas, neighbourhood spots, family-run places. Usually detachable, so you pick it up and pass it around the table as everyone orders their round. Ordering only, no payment. Food arrives before you've paid, and then payment is done at the counter when you leave, handled by a person.

🇰🇷 Korea: the Smart Store Technology Program subsidises kiosks and tablets for small businesses — a digital economy strategy.

🇯🇵 Japan: the Tokyo subsidy funds multilingual tablets and cashless payment — an inbound tourism strategy.

Korea funds kiosks to modernise small businesses. Japan funds them to welcome visitors.

I found both approaches genuinely impressive for different reasons. Korea never made me feel confused. Japan never made me feel rushed.

Yes, I've been having a lot of fun with self-ordering kiosks. But there are real design lessons here too.

Japan's pay-at-counter model is a good reminder that not every touchpoint needs to be digital. The kiosk handles ordering. The human handles the farewell. Knowing where to keep the person in the loop matters as much as knowing where to remove friction.

Visual menus increase order values, reduce decision anxiety, and work across language barriers. A good photo does the job a translation can't. Japan both understood this before the data confirmed it — shokuhin sampuru have been outside Japanese restaurants since 1932.

On kiosks with no English at all, the experience is still navigable. A cart icon means cart. The big button bottom-right means confirm or order. The trash icon means delete. When you strip away language, what's left is hierarchy, position and iconography — and Korea and Japan have built systems that work because these conventions are respected consistently. Cross-cultural UX runs on universal patterns, not translation.

As we talked about in Part 1 with RedNote — users adapt to new UX patterns when the value is clear. Koreans didn't resist all-in-one kiosk payment. They embraced it because it genuinely saves time.

USEN Ticket & Pay kiosks in Japan launch with five languages as standard. Korean kiosks typically cover four. For countries with significant tourist numbers, this is a core product decision. Getting it wrong means a chunk of your customers can't use your product.

In the West, sophisticated UX is still seen as a big-company investment. In Korea and Japan, a four-table restaurant runs a more considered ordering system than many high-street chains in Europe — helped by government programs that cover most of the cost. The lesson isn't just for designers: when adoption is affordable, the bar gets set by everyone, not just the big chains.

LG's kiosk hardware for Japan includes height-adjustable screens, screen reader support and tactile controls as standard. Not added later, not optional. Worth thinking about next time accessibility comes up as a phase two conversation. 😅

Every time I recommend Seoul or Tokyo cafes, restaurants or my fav spots to designer friends, the ordering conversation comes up. "Why don't we have this?"

I used to think the answer was cultural — a willingness to trust that users will adapt, that small businesses can lead. But while researching this piece I found a more concrete one: government money. 🤑 Korea subsidises kiosks and tablets to keep small businesses competitive. Japan subsidises multilingual tablets to grow tourism. Different goals, same street-level result — a four-table restaurant can afford technology that an independent café in Sydney or London can't.

Australia, for comparison, currently offers an AI capability pilot — nine hours of coaching for small businesses, in South Australia only, with a co-contribution required. Helpful, maybe. But no kiosk programs, no language support, no tourism-driven hardware. That laminated menu exists partly because nobody is helping replace it.

Then again, government money doesn't appear from nowhere. Funding follows what a country already cares about. Korea invests in kiosks because Koreans want their businesses modern and competitive. Japan invests in multilingual tablets because welcoming guests well is already the culture — the money just scales it. Small business owners have to want the change first. And people travel more than ever, see that things can work better elsewhere, and bring those expectations home.

So maybe it was cultural all along — just not in the way I first thought. The best devices don't just reflect a culture as it is. They reflect where it wants to go.

The hardware is spreading anyway — global installations near 450,000 terminals, the Asia-Pacific market heading toward $13 billion by 2030. But hardware was never the hard part.

Korea and Japan figured that out. And now I'm back in Sydney, squinting at laminated menus again — missing every single one of those screens. 🥹