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Restaurant Reshapes Happy Hour with Point-Of-Sale System

A restaurant business was interested in streamlining their processes related to taking orders, placing orders, and fulfilling them. We offered to redesign their Point-Of-Sale (POS) system to improve these processes. Their staff consists of seasoned employees of the industry, so my recommendations were intended to enhance their abilities to expertly serve customers.

Problem

• Manager and staff workflow is not optimized due to POS system language and when employees need to go between the front-of-the house and back-of-the house.

• Employee’s need to create significant work-arounds to minimize errors from a system that doesn’t support happy hour labeling.

• Employee’s need to communicate verbally about the happy hour limitations to improve the customer’s happy hour experience.

Methods

Cognitive Walk-through- To get an understanding of how the Point-Of-Sale system currently works I watched videos of employees perform the main tasks, and I wrote down each step taken. This enabled me to understand their system before the Contextual Inquiry.

Contextual Inquiry- This method was used within the restaurant to observe and interview the employees and manager work. My goal was to find the pain points of the users and therefore the opportunities to assist and improve the current processes.

Low-fidelity Prototyping- I sketched out new ideas and modifications to the current system.

Interaction Flow- I added another level of low-fidelity prototyping by sketching out the interactions and to see how they would flow together.

Invision Prototyping- After I created the high-fidelity design in Sketch, I imported it into Invision and prototyped the interactions. I delivered it by Invision Presentation. This allowed the stakeholder to interact with the prototype as well as understand the “how” and “why” behind the proposed changes. It also gave them the opportunity to be part of the design process, and make comments and suggestions within the presentation.

Findings and recommendations

1. Activate the happy hour button in the Point-Of-Sale system during happy hour times, and make it inactive other times.

2. Label happy hour drinks within the Point-Of-Sale system with the beverage name to improve inventory efficiency.

3. Label HH (happy hour) on the ticket, so the kitchen knows the correct portion size.

4. Place a label on the print menu to indicate Dine-In Only for happy hour times.

5. Reviewed for accessibility considerations (1/8 men and 1/200 women have colorblindness).