“What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?”(javlaskitsystem.se) |
“What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?”(javlaskitsystem.se) |
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.
"...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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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. :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
Although, this is not an excuse for making something 4 clicks instead of one (i.e. to replace crossing something with a pen)
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.
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.
Throw in inflexible enterprise software (why do we have to specify delivery time down to the second!?) and it gets even more fun....
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.
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.
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.
http://javlaskitsystem.se.nyud.net/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-...
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?
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.
--Dieter Rams.
Maybe not on the regular basis, but I found writing on LCDs with a whiteboard pen helpful on numerous occasions
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.
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.
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.
Lyx? Maybe pushing it a bit on ease of use, though.
By the way, Office has used an XML format since 2007.
(I know choosing a style is also a one click operation but i'm generalizing)
You do realize that software should meet the business needs - not the business meeting the software needs?
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...
Usually these smaller swedish restaurants doesn't have any management and the owner is usually the headwaiter.
Also of interest: the company uses a freemium model.
Between the two, you need a lot of extra income to make up for the tax!
That would explain the use of felt pen as a financial incentive, rather than as a UI fault...
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.
skita: old Swedish, Icelandic skíta; common germanic word (Ger. scheissen, Eng. shit), to an Indo-European root with meaning 'split, separate'
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."
You can blame management and bad communication all you want but the fact is that what seems rational and efficient for some people (management) is irrational and inefficient for others (the person actually doing the work).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
If your software relies on fixing flaws in humans, it's probably going to fail.
A friend of mine used to be in Quality management at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, here are two (of many) stories
The hospital patient management process is somewhat paralysed because every department has its own custom system for managing patients. He was involved in trying to get a hospital-wide system in, but the CEO was more interested in "making her mark" than managing the hospital, which would require forcing the point with the department heads. So quite frequently patients moving between departments would not have their receiving department ready or even aware of their arrival. Generally the issue was that either department heads liked the shiny toys brought by sales rep -foo- (doctors get a lot through sales rep gifts) and didn't want to change because they'd stop getting them; or that the doctor was stonewalling because they didn't want to learn a new system. Classic case of everyone saying "something must be done... by someone else!". The kicker is that no matter how persuasive your argument might be, the doc would have the last word with "children will die if I can't use this software" and the argument would end.
The other story is much shorter: at one bigwig's meeting, one of the senior specialists - a 27-year veteran - shot down a new doctor's comments saying that he wasn't familiar with how things work here. The new doctor's reply? "I've been here 17 years..."
I've had a microcosm of this experience as well. While installing monitoring gear for one of the departments, the department chief went ballistic because the new computers had power cables that were touching the desk: "It's written into the quote that the power cables will not touch the desk!". Nonsense, of course, but it's how she gets things to her liking - she was the poster girl for post-contract feature changes. I would have called her on it to try and forestall the next few things that were 'in the contract', but my company was spineless and would never have backed me up.
I guess the short form is: a large part of the reason why software is terrible in hospitals is because not many people that have a say are actually evaluating the software properly.
There's a special case for England's "connecting for health" $18billion nightmare.
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"?
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...