top of page
Darden POS Redesign
Redesigning the entire Point of Sale (POS) system from in restaurant terminals to the Enterprise control application.
Tools Used
Research
For this project, it started with research at the restaurants and talking with the managers and servers who used the POS terminals in the restaurants. I was looking to learn about how they typically use the current system and any work arounds they use to speed up or complete certain tasks. After going into the restaurants, I created personas for the different users.
Personas
Restaurant Observation Findings
Server's don't know out of stock items
Servers would not know what items were unavailable until after taking and order and getting back to the POS terminal and then going through the menu options until they find the specific dish. They requested a list be visible on the login or similar landing page for quick viewing.
Dish modifications are challenging
When a customer requested modifications to a dish it was very complicated and took a long time to edit the dish correctly. There needed to be a more streamlined and simple process to customize dishes.
Too many manager override swipes needed
Servers and managers requested an updated way to handle or remove the excessive manager override card swipes that currently were required. Managers would have to swipe at least two times just to sign into a terminal, and then swipe additional times to resolve the issues with the order.
Current State UI Issues
I did a heuristic evaluation of the current state and called out issues discovered during research and observations from actual users. Many servers and managers just took the system as it was and thought they were the ones making mistakes and forgetting things, rather than the software design.
1
2
1
Food Item Colors & Layout
Servers did not feel that the layout and colors used to group items made logical sense and often said they disregard them and just memorize the locations of the items instead.
2
Quantity Selection
Selecting the quantity of an item was not intuitive and had to be selected prior to selecting the dish and then changed again for the next dish. Positioning was also unintuitive
3
4
3
Hidden Content
For both servers and managers, there were a majority of pages/tabs that were hidden and required the employee to have a broken navigation structure.
4
Too Many Nested Hierarchies
The current UI had at times 4+ different navigation sections with some being global and others depending on the page or current selection. This was very confusing.
5
5
Lack of Grouping / Info Overload
The dish edit page was a large group of buttons that was hard to visually look through and the color groupings didn't have any actual meaning. Almost all servers we asked requested a feature that actually already existed on this page, but they had never been able to find it.
Initial Designs
After seeing the pain points from the server's perspective I created some initial updated designs for the POS system in the restaurants. I focused on creating an intuitive UI that removed the need to search and find the functionality they needed and consolidate screens needed for more complex interactions.
Key Improvements
Reduced Number of Navigation Levels
Across the application I reduced the amount of navigation levels to improve readability and understanding of the current page the user is on. I added in a hamburger menu in the top left to hold some of the extra pages that used to be permanantly displayed across all the pages.
Simplified Dish Customization Page
With every dish having a multitude of customization options, one of my biggest focuses came to streamlining and simplifying how a server can quickly customize the items based off the customer's requests.
Added Notification Panel on Table Page
After speaking with servers, it was clear that there were some actions and events they currently did not get notified about that were very important. So with the new UI I added in a small notification panel on the right to give them quick access to important changes or updates for them to take action on. Previously, some of this information was completely unavailable to the servers.
Design Updates/Changes
During reviews of the initial UI designs I got a lot of feedback and adjusted my designs accordingly. I wanted to do more user testing in restaurants to validate the initial designs but wasn't able to do much of that. So many pages reverted to a revised version of the current state. I moved the check to the left hand side to match current state which servers were accustomed to. I also added in a new guest selection/representation UI on the check itself (seen on the first image). On other pages I kept the same design but highlighted only the actions that were available, which reduced the cognitive load for servers.
Final Designs
After a few revisions I started working on the final designs. These images are from early versions of the final design that I was working on. We reduced the visual clutter from the old state and pulled in colors from a custom pallet derived from all of the different brands under Darden. More tweaks were in the process of being made but I was not on this project all the way to the end due to me changing companies.
Lessons Learned
Focus on User's Needs
Making sure designs are tested and verified with users as they are the ones that will be using the product, not anyone else on the project. Testing early and often provides a lot of insights regarding how well the proposed design will work.
Understand Stakeholder Visions
While stakeholders aren't the end users, as a designer I still needed to know what the vision for the updated application was for the primary stakeholders. There were a few times when things didn't line up and time was wasted having to go back and make adjustments.
Think Outside the Box
Just because something works in the current state, doesn't mean it can't be improved. I learned to really think in different ways and visualize each step of the user flow through different lenses to give me new ideas.
Provide Small UX Suggestions
Some client individuals didn't want to change much from the current state, so as I went through the process I provided small UX tweaks that would improve the process for the end users. I wanted to gradually work on new improvements to ensure client was commfortable with the changes without it being too much.
bottom of page