HungerStation is one of the top food ordering platforms in Saudi Arabia (the Kingdom’s equivalent to DoorDash or Deliveroo) , and the new tech is designed to combat customer indecision when deciding what to eat – helping reduce abandoned baskets and cutting down on hours spent scrolling and going back and forth between options.
HungerStation teamed with creative agency Wunderman Thompson to develop the tool, which gives the decision making over to the subscious. The inspiration came from the study The Biology of Belief by Dr Bruce Lipton which found ‘the conscious mind can only process 40 bits of info a second, while the subconscious mind can process information up to 500,000 times quicker’.
It works by presenting different images of cuisine to users via the HungerStation app. It uses the camera (on mobile or desktop) and in-app eye calibration and vision AI to track user eye movements. It then uses topic modelling to organise food options and present a report based on what users spent longest looking at to uncover – in theory – what the subscious mind is craving. In practice, the tech feels gimmicky and works only on the limited basis of how long a users’ eye rests on an image, rather than taking into account dietary preferences.
While limited in its scope and application at this stage, the feature represents a step towards zero UI, removing the need for manual user inputs. Wunderman Thompson referred to the tech as an example of ‘compressed commerce’, reducing the time from inspiration to purchase.
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