“What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?”

http://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/

by wilhelm • 14 years ago

452 89 14 years ago

cperciva2• 14 years ago

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.

tathagatadg2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

spuz• 14 years ago

Perhaps they taped a sheet of acetate over the screen.

nknight3• 14 years ago

My experience with generic "Don't put this chemical on that surface" issues has been that it usually takes quite a long time of heavy contact before there's a noticeable effect. I'm guessing an Italian restaurant with an identifiable "head waiter" can afford to replace a $200 monitor every few months.

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

A random pen I used for exactly the same purpose didn't do any lasting damage to LCD, so I guess it's not that difficult to find them.

hub_• 14 years ago

If the LCD screen is a glass, like on Apple hardware, there is no problem. :-)

cperciva2• 14 years ago

I thought Apple screens had special coatings on the surface of the glass.

ynniv• 14 years ago

Have you been to a restaurant? Unless it's a touch screen, they probably have a 10 year old glass CRT.

lflux• 14 years ago

In Sweden, they're all TFTs these days. Even the non-touch ones.

binarymax4• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

binarymax4• 14 years ago

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_...

Peroni2• 14 years ago

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.

binarymax4• 14 years ago

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?

Peroni2• 14 years ago

No, as I clearly said, I'm blaming the management for not clearly communicating to the staff why the new system will prove to be more efficient in the long run.

ht_th• 14 years ago

But in the end it probably does both. I often find that when developing some system we end up with a less than optimal result due to all kinds of constraints. Sometimes there just isn't enough money to finish the project the way I wanted, or the existing ICT infrastructure isn't under my control and I and my clients have to make ends meet. Then the organisation starts growing around the solution like a leukocyte encapsulating a non-own-body cell and it becomes part of the organisation.

vacri3• 14 years ago

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

leftnode• 14 years ago

Unless the management bought a general scheduling system and not one specifically made for the restaurant business, then this is the fault of the software developers for building a system without doing the appropriate market research first.

3ch0• 14 years ago

I do believe this is a general restaurant booking system. By looking at the URL in the image you can see that this is a online based restaurant booking system.

Usually these smaller swedish restaurants doesn't have any management and the owner is usually the headwaiter.

SyneRyder• 14 years ago

It was made specifically for the restaurant business. Look closely at the last screenshot. You can see that it's a web app running in Chrome. The URL is visible, and the website is a "reservation service for restaurants".

Also of interest: the company uses a freemium model.

crististm4• 14 years ago

What do you say about the shitty interface the mp3 player in my phone has?

At first I thought I'm so dumb that I'm not able to adapt; then I adapted and realized the interface _was_ indeed shit.

The tons of frustration with idiotic interfaces still keeps me away for the "smart" in smartphones - sigh...

chops• 14 years ago

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!

nknight3• 14 years ago

> 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• 14 years ago

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").

untog• 14 years ago

Well, apparently they built the whole thing with restaurants in mind:

http://livebookings.net/

dalys• 14 years ago

Another fun example from the blog:

http://vardforbundetbloggen.se/gotlandsbloggen/files/2011/11...

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.

zyfo• 14 years ago

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

dsr_• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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?

hippich• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

ErrantX• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

sgdesign• 14 years ago

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…

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

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

MiguelHudnandez3• 14 years ago

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.

nantes• 14 years ago

Server seems to be buckling, Coral Cache link <http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...;

dfc• 14 years ago

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-...

dustingetz• 14 years ago

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?

Kiro• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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....

DanBC2• 14 years ago

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.

phil• 14 years ago

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.

sneak2• 14 years ago

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

   --Dieter Rams

Too2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

Too2• 14 years ago

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)

Elepsis• 14 years ago

Styles were available well before 2007. But hardly anyone knew about or used them until the arrival of the ribbon.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

> 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.

Lyx? Maybe pushing it a bit on ease of use, though.

gbog• 14 years ago

> 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.

Notepad? Vim? Plus a little bit of Markdown?

I had to do a big certification project. A guy went on with a MS project massive file on my team with milestones, completion percentages and so on. I couldn't see it without nausea (and obviously I couldn't see it at all on my Linux box), so I dumped it as text, reformatted it with some Mardown and custom markup, and did a little parser highlighter in a week-end. Then I could put this under version control, have meaningful commits and diffs, and the MS project guy stopped trying to micro-manage my team, and was fired eventually...

That is to say that for me (but not for everyone, I am aware of that issue) nothing beats plain text and, when needed, some markup. Exceptions could be printed books and magazines. But I would not trust MS Word with a 500 pages specification document, and more so because it is important and long, and must be precise. As far as I can tell, TCP/IP specs are written in pure text with some markup.

code_pockets• 14 years ago

>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.

That is why I'm building (actually finishing the ALPHA release) of a little FOSS app named Paste Box.

It is a paste bin/simple word processor with one click saving ( to a db ), syntax highligthing, user accounts, one button search feature, anonymous pasting, and a simple (but easy on the eyes) UI.

It also features a simplified install process, to keep the IT dept. from going postal.

The first release is a PHP/sqlite version, then a .NET version will follow (desktop and ASPX versions), and then a RoR version.

After those are done, I plan (if people actually use the thing) to add simple text formatting features with JS.

I came up with the idea after realizing that office people have a pretty bad workflow when dealing with text files.

They have to open up Word (which depending on their system, can take up to a minute), then they have to save the document, but not without deciding on a name. Worse if they have to create a directory to store the file into. This does not take into account all the different options that Word offers in terms of file types (which most people don't understand.

I just want to save people time (and whats left of their sanity).

The git repo for the project is over at github/codepockets.

All the code in there is just prototype (read: ugly, non-working)(I follow TDD).

Once the thing is ready and tested, I shall announce it to the community. Deadline is the last day of February.

-- code pockets.

michaelbuckbee• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Those owners are unlikely to buy computer POS type systems in the first place.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

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.

csallen• 14 years ago

This reminds me of one of the musings of Charlie Munger:

"...Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way. One implication is that people who create things like cash registers, which make dishonest behavior hard to accomplish, are some of the effective saints of our civilization because, as [B. F.] Skinner so well knew, bad behavior is intensely habit-forming when it is rewarded.

"And so the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And, by the way, Patterson, the great evangelist of the cash register, knew that from his own experience. He had a little store, and his employees were stealing him blind, so that he never made any money. Then people sold him a couple of cash registers, and his store went to profit immediately.

"He promptly closed the store and went into the cash register business, creating what became the mighty National Cash Register Company, one of the glories of its time."

Karellen• 14 years ago

That punchline is one of the funniest things I've read all week! Thanks.

mbell• 14 years ago

>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.

Actually that is exactly what I would except, nothing to do with Ohio or a sleepy town I thought it was pretty well known that businesses of this type deal with a large 'skim factor' just like its common knowledge that many in the food/beverage service industry don't report all income to the IRS (pocket tips and not report it). In fact it was my understanding that almost everyone knows this (in regards to tips not landing on IRS forms) and lets it slide as really its the only way those that do this as a 'real job[0]' get by. This is why it is, at least for those I've known, considered 'bad form' to tip on credit card as those tips flow through company pipes to the employee's taxable income.

[0] real job meaning career employment vs a job while getting through college or whatever.

doublerebel• 14 years ago

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.

readme• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

pragmatic• 14 years ago

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.

“What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?”

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