Background & design

Imagine you and a group of five of your friends go to a restaurant. At the end of the meal, one of your peers asks the server to give everyone individual checks, except for Jimmy, who’ll be paying for Samantha, and for Carlos, who didn’t eat any of the nachos so doesn’t want that on his bill, and Jeremy who will only pay for food that’s the color orange. All of the joy in the restaurant is snuffed out by the server’s dead-eyed stare and sealed-lip half smile. This isn’t science fiction.

Having used a number of POS systems in my time working in busy restaurants, almost nothing is worse than having to take a few minutes to organize a table’s order by seat, splitting individual items, and moving around others when every second is precious.

Many, if not all POS systems on the market today use touchscreens, but not many utilize all of the functionality that modern tablets are capable of. My goal was to create a POS that allowed for common touchscreen interactions to be used practically. These would include swiping, for use when switching between tickets, holding your finger on items for more options, and dragging and moving items between seats, as you can see on the table’s overview on the left side of my design’s screen. This is all in an effort to simplify complicated customer checkouts.

A few months ago, I went to a late-night comedy show, one where the stage was lit with overhead lighting and the rest of the room was dimmed, drawing the viewer’s attention to the comic. Throughout the show, as people were ordering drinks and greasy food, the roaming servers would periodically go to their POS station to send orders which would flashbang the audience. This system, like every point-of-sale I’ve used working dinner services at restaurants, was using a bright white interface, one that would work for a mid-day café, but was jarring and unsuitable for this space.

I decided this was important to address in my design, so I gave it a dark UI that’s easy on the eyes of both the user and the customers in low-light environments.

The prototype for the payment processing of a split check is available to test below.