DESIGN RESTAURANT SYSTEMS

Welcome to the Restaurant Systems Challenge! There are two main systems our restaurant client wants to improve: the customer ordering system and the system for customers paying their bill. Right now, both systems are pretty old-school: pieces of paper that people deliver by hand.

It might seem like any digital system would be an improvement on that, but there's a reason why the restaurant hasn't updated its systems yet--it's hard to come up with ordering and billing systems that are quick and easy for busy waitstaff to learn and use on the restaurant floor.

This project, we're taking our restaurant client from paper to digital.

We've all been to restaurants. It's pretty amazing that most of them still use paper for orders. The waiters have a pad of paper that they take out of their pocket and write your order on. They walk to the kitchen area and tear off that sheet of paper and hand it to the kitchen staff. They walk back to the kitchen every so often to see if their order is ready--in some restaurants, the kitchen staff shout out when an order is ready. This is an old system ready for updating. But it's high-pressure: no waiter wants to mess with learning a new system when they have ten tables waiting for their food.

The situation is pretty similar when it comes to customers paying the bill. It's paper, it's slow, it needs to change and it's hard to change.

You'll design the UI for the new systems.

Project Proposal and Analysis

User observation and interview notes: Write up your interview notes. Describe the persons that you observed and interviewed. For each interviewee, describe a particular breakdown or workaround that demonstrates a feature of the problem you're trying to solve. (Fully describes interviewee. Describes more than one breakdown or workaround that demonstrates a feature of the problem)

Write a problem statement: Decide which issue you want to focus on and describe the problem it creates for workers. Don't include solutions! --that comes later. Describe 3 goals by your workers and the barriers that prevent them from achieving those goals.( Problem is well-defined. Describes at least 3 user's goals and barriers to achieving goals.)

Write a user class description: Describe each subset of the restaurant employee population that might use your new system and how they would use it. Go beyond generic distinctions such as "expert" and "novice". (Identified more than 2 user classes)

Identify user goals: What are the general, high-level tasks associated with the problem your system addresses? Describe three goals your proposed system would address and connect them to your restaurant worker interviews and user class description.( Identified more than 3 user goals that the proposed system would address)