
“What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?” - wilhelm
http://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/
======
michaelbuckbee
You wouldn't expect a family owned pizza shop in a small, sleepy Ohio town to
be a hive of scum and villainy but that's what installing a computerized
ordering system discovered.

I had worked off and on through college at this same pizza shop and about
midway through my time there they switched from paper written tickets to a
lightpen based ordering system.

Everyone threw a fit: "It's too hard to use", "It's not as quick as just
writing 'LP' for a large pepperoni and an illegible address on a piece of
paper".

This goes on for a week, orders are slow to go out, things are messed up, the
phone lines are always busy so everybody knows we're losing business (people
hang up and call somewhere else or get frustrated waiting for their food to be
delivered).

The owner's contemplating canceling the system and going back to paper until
the weekly tally is done and it is discovered that revenue is actually UP 30%
for the week.

Drivers were massively skimming by "losing" tickets: drivers would go out on a
run, deliver 4 orders and only return the cash and tickets for 3 of them.
Managers would pull the same trick after hours: toss a $20 ticket in the trash
and pocket the cash.

The computerized order system (which everybody settled into after a while) was
an astonishingly good investment for the shop - ROI measured in weeks - and
quickly led to a 75% turnover in the staff.

I don't know what's in the 4 mouse clicks to check each reservation in (as
mentioned in the article), those steps might be worthless, they might be
what's preventing the maitre'd from taking a folded twenty and seating someone
who just walked in versus the couple who made a reservation weeks ago - and
pissing them off in the process.

And without that information it's very hard to say whether or not the UI of
that application is good or bad. Employees on the ground maximize their
personal short term interests, owners paying for infrastructure have both a
longer term view and different incentives.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Flip side is it's harder for the owner to skim and not pay taxes. Quite a few
places are cash only, paper receipts, no electronic trail for that reason.

~~~
sliverstorm
Eh, if your revenues are up 30%, you're probably coming out ahead even if you
used to evade tax on 100% of your revenue.

~~~
swombat
Not necessarily... UK VAT is 20%, and so is Corporation Tax.

Between the two, you need a lot of extra income to make up for the tax!

------
phil
I spent two years building one of these systems (<http://rez.urbanspoon.com>).
It runs on the iPad and I'm pretty confident it's the market leader in terms
of usability.

A lot of the responses in here make it out like this is about stupid arrogant
programmers who didn't bother to understand anyone's needs. That's not true;
what's really going on is that the design challenges are significant -- think
high end calendaring plus inventory management, but used one handed for 5
seconds at a time. And design is not how restaurants get sold anyway -- they
get sold on the marketing and table optimization stuff, which Live Bookings is
actually pretty good at.

A good counterexample to look at are the back of house systems restaurants
use. That's the touch screen they plug your order in to. Next time you're out
to eat, notice the high information density and the fact that your server can
key the entire order for your party of six in like 3 seconds. The fact that
they all look like ass is not really relevant -- a lot of those setups are
very well designed.

------
chops
Great story about interfaces designed by people who don't use the software.

I've been encountering similar bad interfaces as I've been working volleyball
tournaments mainly to learn how large scale tournaments are run and frankly
the software out there works like something I might have built 15 years ago
when I first learned MSAccess and VBA - that is to say, the interface is
terribly clunky and not at all intuitive.

Though for niche products visible only to workers and admins, the 'vim
principle' applies: software CAN afford to be (initially) intuitive, if it
speeds up the workflow after a bit of training. Unfortunately, this current
tournament software does not do that to the degree it should. There's no
reason it can't be both efficient and highly intuitive based on what I've
seen.

I aim to fix that!

~~~
nknight
> _people who don't use the software_

It's far worse than that. Either they've never set foot in a busy restaurant,
or they're insufferable, self-absorbed bores who don't take five seconds to
look up at what's going on in the world around them.

~~~
funkah
Ouch. Well, sometimes the dev _wants_ to look at the world around them but
isn't able. For example, I used to work for a company that sold software to
health clubs, including high end ones like Equinox. I made various things,
from a web app to allowing people to check in to the club using only their
fingerprint. Most of what I made was used by the staff of the health clubs,
but I was never allowed to actually go to the clubs and see these things being
used. Instead, I had to rely on the knowledge of a guy who just knew a lot of
stuff about the industry (ie, a "business analyst").

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
There's no reason to take offense--You'd be part of the first group, through
no fault of your own.

Although you could have obtained a gym membership and checked it out. Or just
showed up and asked nicely to see the system in use. If you introduced your
pelf as "someone who wants to make check-in systems easier," I bet you'd get
some info.

I have had several experiences like this: I get asked to build software and
hardware systems for trade shows, and I get to attend to implement the
technology. What I learn during the first show rivals all the meetings and
handed-down info from the stakeholders. I am actually very excited about my
projects now that he second occurrence is coming up for some of them.

~~~
Klinky
Getting a membership would have cost him money & hassle. Showing up at the
client's place of business without permission from your company sounds like a
good way to get reprimanded, maybe even fired if the company got the
impression you were "going rogue" & trying to steal the contract from them.

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
My intention with my comment was to encourage people to avoid behaving
helplessly. That is a potential trap that could keep one surrounded in
mediocrity.

I did intend to suggest that an unapproved visit to your employer's client
would be conducted anonymously, but I did not word it very well.

------
ErrantX
A friend of mine has a restaurant and constantly gripes about the poor
usability computer reservation system.

However he also pointed out one thing this blog misses (r.e. the reasons
restaurants use them) and that is that it lets them automate reservations -
i.e. let people reserve online.

Apparently this can be a major advantage now; significant enough to take the
awkwardness.

He also mentioned that the computer has advantages over a whiteboard in that
it is easier to modify cleanly, limits the number of things like double
bookings and so forth, that a whiteboard can create. :)

~~~
smackfu
More than that, the online systems may give you the software for free and
possibly the computer too, because they will take a $1 or so off of each
reservation. Since restaurants are perpetually cash-strapped, this saving to
the owner outweighs any inconvenience to the actual users.

------
pragmatic
Isn't this really about the dichotomy between owner/manager and worker?

Many systems we built are specified by the managers of the workers. And of
course they want lots metrics and fail safes and all kinds of extras the
result in a really crufty system.

So the workers try all they can to "route around the damage" of such a system.
And the workers aren't happy, but the management is, because for the first
time, they can really see what is going on in the business.

This isn't a software issue, this is a fundamental split between management's
and worker's interest.

If you think you are going to solve that with some fancy UI design and the
latest touch screen hardware, well...I wish you luck.

------
dustingetz
There's this awesome karaoke bar in Philly where you can rent private rooms
with their own karaoke machine. the interface is so bad, that I, a software
engineer, was unable to get it to work without getting extremely frustrated,
calling for help multiple times. so naturally I start thinking about how I
could build a business around karaoke machines with nice UX and rent them. But
it turns out a karaoke machine is useless without a library of content, and
the company that builds them is a subsidiary of a Japanese label thus can
negotiate discounts with content owners. It's just not something that's easy
to compete with.

Anyway, I go to this karaoke bar about 6 times a year and drop a hundred bucks
each time. I don't think they care to invest in UX right now ;)

anyway, if you extrapolate this idea a bit, it makes you wonder - if software
is your business's core competency, and you're competing mostly on UX, maybe
you are doing it wrong?

------
Too
Great story.

I think this is the same reason Microsoft Office is so popular when there
usually are "better" alternatives. Because Word is like pen and paper with
spell check. You can add whatever shit you want wherever you want with zero
effort. But you don't realize the technical debt you will have to pay for
later because nothing is consistent, diffing is a nightmare and your data is
everything but normalized.

Want a header, just increase the fontsize, Is that really a header? _"Hmm,
it's thick and big, whatever, did anyone say lunchbreak?"_ Save exit.

For small temporary documents like party-invitations this is fine, doing
anything else would be silly. But companies actually use word for serious
documents like 100+ pages technical specifications valid for years with tons
of versions of each document. It is scary how much mission critical
information that is stored in this form, at one of my previous jobs if changes
happened outside our division, every document depending on this data had to be
updated by hand because it's just plain text in word, nothing is connected or
autogenerated. It's grunt work but it actually gets the job done sooner or
later. I've seen this in several places. Word and excel keeps the world
spinning even though it at the same time requires much more manpower than is
reasonable.

Someone has to make an alternative to word that is as easy to use but doesn't
allow you to do all the stupid stuff. Enforce styles, make references and
other data-connections easy, smooth and reliable and provide a good diff.

I think this is one of the greatest challenges in software development, allow
freedom at the same time as you have a strict data model that can be analyzed,
processed and generated by a program. Something that paper will always beat,
regardless of what kind of paper you get you can always write and highlight on
it, with software that is very exceptional.

~~~
rprasad
Styles (available since 2007). Mailmerge/Datasources tools (Office 97 or
earlier). Bibliography/References tool (Office 2000 or earlier).

By the way, Office has used an XML format since 2007.

~~~
Too
Proves the articles point even more. Even when all the features are there,
people still just wanna get the task out of their hands as quickly as possible
and press the bold-button because it takes them one click less than choosing a
style _, and it is still enough to consider the task complete.

(_I know choosing a style is also a one click operation but i'm generalizing)

------
hippich
Something looked wrong a bit:

    
    
      And the companies selling computer systems (of all kinds,
      in many businesses) usually push the possibilities to get 
      such data as big advantages with their system. But is it 
      worth the effort? In many cases, a headwaiter would 
      probably know most of what really matters anyway from 
      experience or rule-of-thumb.
    

Management, not headwaiter buys software, and results of this software most
likely used by management to do right decisions. And what if headwaiter leave
company, hit by a bus, abducted by aliens? It is better to have data in
computer harddrive/tape/dvd.

Although, this is not an excuse for making something 4 clicks instead of one
(i.e. to replace crossing something with a pen)

~~~
drunkpotato
I think you missed a great takeaway from the article: that it doesn't matter
if the software calculates these things if it can't collect that data in the
first place.

1) Nobody uses a useless and awkward system as intended, 2) so the data is not
collected, 3) so there is nothing to analyze, 4) management cannot base their
decisions on data that does not exist, 5) time and money was wasted for no
productive purpose.

------
Kiro
This is why everyone should have had a "real" job at least once, even if
you've been a programmer since birth. It's a real eye-opener to realise how
bad systems work in practice.

~~~
JaggedJax
We develop software for warehouses and I am continually flabbergasted at how
our stuff is used. That being said, we work very closely with a few of our
customers to get direct feedback and know what is and isn't working for
people.

If you're writing software and not getting feedback from someone using it in a
real environment, you're more than likely not making it very user friendly.

~~~
Natsu
Having seen things like this first hand, I can confirm your observations.
Things are weird enough on their own.

Throw in inflexible enterprise software (why do we have to specify delivery
time down to the _second_!?) and it gets even more fun....

------
dalys
Another fun example from the blog:

[http://vardforbundetbloggen.se/gotlandsbloggen/files/2011/11...](http://vardforbundetbloggen.se/gotlandsbloggen/files/2011/11/sakervard-224x300.jpg)

The photo is from a health center and one panel is apparently to control the
radio, the other one is an alarm system for the patients.

------
cperciva
I'm surprised they managed to find a whiteboard pen which didn't destroy their
display. Most of them have solvents which I would expect to interact poorly
with the surfaces of LCD monitors.

~~~
tathagatadg
That's the smartest part of the hack I guess - that the waiter actually
invested time to test out his idea! Who knows probably the first marker he
picked up didn't work the way he expected and he moved on to the next one till
he found what worked.

~~~
user24
It's more likely he doesn't give a monkeys about degrading the LCD display and
the first whiteboard pen he found worked fine.

~~~
tathagatadg
:D ... guess you are right!

------
Peroni
Great story however I think the author is missing a link in the communication
chain.

 _Computer systems are not always used as the developers suppose._

I would happily bet good money that the developers built what they believed to
be a useful and efficient system that the thoroughly tested. A view that I
will guarantee was shared by the restaurant owner who purchased the system and
implemented it into his restaurant and spent valuable time teaching the staff
how to use it.

A couple of busy nights later and the staff are struggling to remember the
sequence they are meant to follow and instead of familiarising themselves and
becoming more efficient with the system over time they implement a very basic
system that takes less effort to remember.

This is less of a case of a poor system and more a case of poor management
mainly because the staff obviously weren't trained and sold on the system
properly and no follow-up checks have taken place to ensure the system is
being used correctly.

~~~
binarymax
So you're blaming the staff for an impractical UI?

You do realize that software should meet the business needs - not the business
meeting the software needs?

~~~
vacri
That's a throwaway slogan that implies that businesses shouldn't ever have to
change their processes.

~~~
crististm
Not when you need to replace an X with four clicks...

You probably know the story with the high-tech tracking systems for planes on
carriers - it was so good and easy to use they had to replace it with toy
planes on a table - true story...

~~~
vacri
I'm not talking about this specific incident, I'm talking about the slogan.
Pointing at a couple of bad examples doesn't mean that sometimes businesses do
have to change their processes to fit software that is better for them. Or
perhaps a better way of putting it is: business _and_ software should change
together to answer what's best for the business.

Where I currently work has shitty inventory control - salesforce for sales and
device tracking, and an Access database for unit consumption.

This is absolutely woeful and has a number of problems to people who know
anything about inventory. Want to know where widget #234 is? Well... I hope
someone entered it against the sale in Salesforce. Cool, they did. Now, can we
make sure that that serial is unique? No. Which batch of components was it
made from? No idea. The _sale_ was accepted on this date, but it wasn't
installed until two months later... when was that? Is the item still in
warranty? We sent device #234 to a demo site, and then it got moved on, and
then it came back and then it was sent to another demo site, we can tell that
right, because an issue has cropped up where we need to know where it's been?
No, there is no history tracking.

Trying to track inventory in salesforce is a fool's errand because they have
no concept that an item is unique and can have history - anything resembling a
serial number is just a user-enterable text field, no protection against
duplicates, no protection against assigning it against sale 2 because it's
already on sale 1.

These are the current business practises where I work, and we've shaped our
processes around them. But we're about to start being more hard-lined about
warranty terms (until know we've been giving free terms as we've been largely
on the VC teat)...

The business needs software that is going to be harder and more complex to use
than "yeah, fill in this free text field with whatever you feel like, if you
feel like it. So yes, sometimes software needs may look to the casual observer
like "this is so arcane and complex", but that doesn't mean that they're
automatically bad - the slogan above is trite and the real problem is that it
implies business shouldn't ever need to change their processes to suit
software. I mean, there is a point to the slogan, but it should be rephrased
to something more suitable.

~~~
crististm
We have similar experiences with software. I think the problem comes from "I'm
smart - you're dumb". The software should help me not the other way around.

Consider my brand new Samsung TV set: I could not believe that program numbers
are not unique! You can have two stations registered with the same program
number!!! Do I have to adapt my business because TVs are suddenly smarter than
me?

If I'm too arrogant to realize that a domain problem has a very simple
solution then I will reinvent the wheel and make it square.

(Indeed, slogans loose their power through overuse - that does not make them
untrue though)

~~~
nknight
> _Consider my brand new Samsung TV set: I could not believe that program
> numbers are not unique! You can have two stations registered with the same
> program number!!!_

As someone who has spent his career in DVRs and smart TV stuff, I have no idea
what you're talking about. What is a "program number" in this context? Are you
confusing "program" with "channel"?

~~~
crististm
I call a "channel" the frequency of a station; "program number" is what the TV
gives me on the remote control to go to a station - the number on the screen.

In that framework, the TV has two frequencies (or channels) associated to the
same "program number". I can switch between the two by entering from the
remote the same "program number" twice or more times...

------
sgdesign
This reminds me of a supermarket where I shop where the point of sale system's
display was so crowded that the cashiers had to draw a big arrow right on the
screen with permanent marker to point at the total price…

------
DanBC
Sometimes people selling / buying software just don't know what the people
using it want. It's weird that this can happen to hugely popular software. Why
don't they train sellers with "A list of common mistakes people make" or
"things to look out for".

I remember months of hours lost because a system I was forced to use could
only search the first 16 characters of a 2 line by 32 character description;
where many of those first 16 characters were identical. (Sage Line 100 in a
sub-contract electronic engineering company.) The vendors knew that searching
for part numbers by description was crucial, as did the company bosses.

No-one wanted to pay for the trivial text edits to the parts-list; that would
have cost at most a couple of hundred pounds. Time lost to searching for
components, or having doubles, was significantly more than that.

------
nantes
Server seems to be buckling, Coral Cache link
<[http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-
waiter-...](http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-
with-the-computer-screen/>);

~~~
dfc
It looks like your link has an extra greater than sign url encoded at the end.
The link should be:

[http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-
waiter-...](http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-
with-the-computer-screen/)

------
doublerebel
I spent years managing restaurants and now develop apps and UI using web
technologies. Being one of the few who truly understand both the needs of a
packed, high-end restaurant/bar/club as well as the technology behind it, this
is a problem I've wanted to solve my entire life. There is still a huge
opportunity here as I can tell from this article and the comments. It is not
easy, which is why it is still an unsolved issue -- but I know the secret
which can marry tech and restaurants in happy harmony. If you are as inspired
as I am to create the next-generation of super-usable restaurant POS, please
drop me a line.

------
binarymax
I also find it interesting that everything has been abstracted behind the
mouse. The stylus was around for a while but is was replaced by the finger.
But does reducing the physical tool set benefit the experience?

Is it practical to increase the physical toolset? Adding pseudo markers and
exacto knives and erasers? This makes it less portable but what does that
matter if its always in the same place?

~~~
rubidium
It matters because extra tools cost money and get lost. If you work in a
restaurant, you don't one a dedicated surgery kit just to indicate that
someone showed up for their reservation.

A touch panel display that does everything, pinch in and out to modify details
on specific tables, swipe to toggle between schedule mode and table view. Move
people by holding on the table, then drag over. This is an easy app in the
ipad age... I'd be surprised if it's not done already.

~~~
binarymax
I admit my mind wandered from the immediate context of the article. Im just
curious overall - like a draftsman using tools that suit the task, not hunting
for an icon and using a mouse that is separate from the screen. Touch
interfaces have come a long way indeed but fingers are still too fat for
precision work. I was a big fan of this as well:
[http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/08/bjork_...](http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/08/bjork_reacTable)

------
sneak
"Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually
the one and only cardinal sin in design."

    
    
       --Dieter Rams

------
readme
Must be a really bad program. I used to be a host and used OpenTable when I
did that. It was pretty easy and did everything we needed.

.

~~~
seancoughlin
yeah, OpenTable is solid. I have experience in the restaurant industry as
well. It does a very good job of mimicking the most efficient offline systems.
Good software designers have to understand the real world experience of a
problem to address it well.

------
TeMPOraL
Haha, nice :). I'm not the only one.

Maybe not on the regular basis, but I found writing on LCDs with a whiteboard
pen helpful on numerous occasions

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
Random Pro-tip related to dry-erase on monitors:

If someone, perhaps an age-impaired individual, draws on your awesome screen
with a permanent marker, you can draw over it with a dry-erase pen to loosen
the permanent ink.

------
zyfo
For all you non-swedish people out there: Jävla skitsystem is swedish for
"fucking shit system".

~~~
dsr_
The etymology of 'skit' is directly related to shit, science, scissors and the
verb shed -- all from a proto-Indo-European word meaning to separate.

~~~
yesbabyyes
Interesting - the verb "separate" in Swedish is "skilja". Science is
(according to wiktionary) from "scire" - "to know". Is that from "separate the
wheat from the chaff", or how is knowledge tied to separation?

~~~
arnsholt
I don't have my full array of dictionaries at hand, but the Oxford Latin
dictionary (the only one worth considering in my opinion if you want a serious
discussion) gives the etymology of scio (the root verb) as possibly related to
Sanskrit chyati and Greek schizo (as in schizo-phrenia, actually), both
meaning to separate. I can't say for the Germanic connection to shit and
friends, but it's not impossible, although I'm not sure where the l comes
from.

I'm not entirely sure which root the Sanskrit form should be but it might be
chid-, which fits with the Greek. In that case, I'd wager an Indo-European
root along the lines of skedH-, with palatal k and laryngeal (IIRC, it's the
laryngeal that gives the Greek z).

As for the derivation of the meaning, I think the notion of "separating right
from wrong" is reasonable, but these things are often notoriously hard to pin
down.

~~~
nemetroid
My Swedish etymological dictionary (Våra Ord) has this on _skita_ (verb form):

 _skita_ : old Swedish, Icelandic _skíta_ ; common germanic word (Ger.
_scheissen_ , Eng. _shit_ ), to an Indo-European root with meaning 'split,
separate'

