7 ms·

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

452 points by wilhelm 15y ago

cperciva 15y 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.
- tathagatadg 15y 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 15y 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.
    - tathagatadg 15y ago
      :D ... guess you are right!
- spuz 15y ago
  Perhaps they taped a sheet of acetate over the screen.
- nknight 15y 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.
- TeMPOraL 15y 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_ 15y ago
  If the LCD screen is a glass, like on Apple hardware, there is no problem. :-)
  - cperciva 15y ago
    I thought Apple screens had special coatings on the surface of the glass.
- ynniv 15y ago
  Have you been to a restaurant? Unless it's a touch screen, they probably have a 10 year old glass CRT.
  - lflux 15y ago
    In Sweden, they're all TFTs these days. Even the non-touch ones.
binarymax 15y 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 15y 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.
  - binarymax 15y 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_reacTable http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/08/bjork_...
Peroni 15y 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.
- binarymax 15y 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?
  - Peroni 15y 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.
    - binarymax 15y ago
      But it isn't efficient. Its so inefficient that the staff have been reduced to using a marker on the screen. Its not a failure of management communication or proper training. It's a failure of the product.
      - jonknee 15y ago
        That could be the case or it could also be the case that the head waiter never took the time to learn and has refused to change his ways. Hard to say from just one data point. The same system could be successfully used in thousands of other restaurants.
chops 15y 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!
- nknight 15y 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 15y 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").
    - MiguelHudnandez 15y ago
      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.
dalys 15y ago
Another fun example from the blog: http://vardforbundetbloggen.se/gotlandsbloggen/files/2011/11/sakervard-224x300.jpg 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 15y ago
For all you non-swedish people out there: Jävla skitsystem is swedish for "fucking shit system".
- dsr_ 15y 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 15y 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?
    - alexscheelmeyer 15y ago
      I would say that knowledge is tied to separation due to the fact that in order for you to know a concept, you will need to know what separates it from everything else. Said in different words: Being able to see only one color is the same as not being able to see. You need at least two colors to see anything, as you need the contrast(separation) to see where something begins and/or ends.
    - antiterra 15y ago
      I'm not sure about "science," but: According to the OED, the noun form of "skill" and the obsolete English verb "skill" (to separate, from Old Norse skilja) are both related to earlier Germanic words for distinction/difference. However, in Middle English, the meaning of skill varied a great deal, sometimes representing, for example: "a statement made by way of argument or reasoning."
    - bdr 15y ago
      I imagine it as originating in knowledge about plants and animals. To know is to be able to separate one species from another, or one individual from the group. In the Genesis myth, the first thing Adam does is give names to different animals. And the Tree of Knowledge revealed the separation of nakedness from non-nakedness. This was before people "knew" things like history or math. I suppose this kind of knowing is similar to how the function `filter` separates things based on a predicate.
hippich 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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…
TeMPOraL 15y 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
- MiguelHudnandez 15y 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 15y ago
Server seems to be buckling, Coral Cache link <http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/&#62 http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...;
- dfc 15y 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-doing-with-the-computer-screen/ http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...
dustingetz 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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....
DanBC 15y 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.
doublerebel 15y 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.
phil 15y ago
I spent two years building one of these systems (http://rez.urbanspoon.com 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.
sneak 15y ago
"Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design." --Dieter Rams
Too 15y 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 15y 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.
  - Too 15y 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)
michaelbuckbee 15y 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 15y 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 15y ago
    Those owners are unlikely to buy computer POS type systems in the first place.
readme 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

452 points by wilhelm 15y 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.

tathagatadg 15y 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 15y 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.
  - tathagatadg 15y ago
    :D ... guess you are right!
spuz 15y ago
Perhaps they taped a sheet of acetate over the screen.
nknight 15y 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.
TeMPOraL 15y 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_ 15y ago
If the LCD screen is a glass, like on Apple hardware, there is no problem. :-)
- cperciva 15y ago
  I thought Apple screens had special coatings on the surface of the glass.
ynniv 15y ago
Have you been to a restaurant? Unless it's a touch screen, they probably have a 10 year old glass CRT.
- lflux 15y ago
  In Sweden, they're all TFTs these days. Even the non-touch ones.

binarymax 15y 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 15y 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.
- binarymax 15y 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_reacTable http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/08/bjork_...

Peroni 15y 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.

binarymax 15y 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?
- Peroni 15y 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.
  - binarymax 15y ago
    But it isn't efficient. Its so inefficient that the staff have been reduced to using a marker on the screen. Its not a failure of management communication or proper training. It's a failure of the product.
    - jonknee 15y ago
      That could be the case or it could also be the case that the head waiter never took the time to learn and has refused to change his ways. Hard to say from just one data point. The same system could be successfully used in thousands of other restaurants.

chops 15y 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!

nknight 15y 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 15y 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").
  - MiguelHudnandez 15y ago
    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.

dalys 15y ago

Another fun example from the blog: http://vardforbundetbloggen.se/gotlandsbloggen/files/2011/11/sakervard-224x300.jpg 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 15y ago

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

dsr_ 15y 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 15y 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?
  - alexscheelmeyer 15y ago
    I would say that knowledge is tied to separation due to the fact that in order for you to know a concept, you will need to know what separates it from everything else. Said in different words: Being able to see only one color is the same as not being able to see. You need at least two colors to see anything, as you need the contrast(separation) to see where something begins and/or ends.
  - antiterra 15y ago
    I'm not sure about "science," but: According to the OED, the noun form of "skill" and the obsolete English verb "skill" (to separate, from Old Norse skilja) are both related to earlier Germanic words for distinction/difference. However, in Middle English, the meaning of skill varied a great deal, sometimes representing, for example: "a statement made by way of argument or reasoning."
  - bdr 15y ago
    I imagine it as originating in knowledge about plants and animals. To know is to be able to separate one species from another, or one individual from the group. In the Genesis myth, the first thing Adam does is give names to different animals. And the Tree of Knowledge revealed the separation of nakedness from non-nakedness. This was before people "knew" things like history or math. I suppose this kind of knowing is similar to how the function `filter` separates things based on a predicate.

hippich 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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…

TeMPOraL 15y 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

MiguelHudnandez 15y 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 15y ago

Server seems to be buckling, Coral Cache link <http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/&#62 http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...;

dfc 15y 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-doing-with-the-computer-screen/ http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...

dustingetz 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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....

DanBC 15y 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.

doublerebel 15y 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.

phil 15y ago

I spent two years building one of these systems (http://rez.urbanspoon.com 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.

sneak 15y ago

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

Too 15y 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 15y 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.
- Too 15y 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)

michaelbuckbee 15y 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 15y 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 15y ago
  Those owners are unlikely to buy computer POS type systems in the first place.

readme 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.