I had the chance to work with a restaurant to look into ways to improve their Point of Sale (or POS) system, called Aloha. The system has a lot of buttons and the manager of the restaurant said they were excited to find ways to simplify how to use the program.
Methods Used
Contextual Evaluation - Cognitive Walkthrough - Wireframing
Tools Used
Sketch - InVision
I started out with a cognitive walkthrough of Aloha to better understand the program before I got on site. I watched a video of someone walking through the program and I watched how different tasks were completed and noted what steps helped or hindered completing that task. The next day I went on site with a team to get a better look at how the servers who use Aloha everyday use it.
Interacting with servers and Aloha in person gave us the opportunity to see if what we guessed would be problems were actually problems and also opened the door to hear about problems that existed that hadn’t occurred to us. Also understanding the context and environment that the system was being used in helped us empathize better and in turn come up with better improvements.
After collecting notes on site, going through the contextual evaluation and cognitive walkthrough it was time to bring that all together and start sketching out ideas. My main takeaways from working with Aloha were that instilling some hierarchy and a little variety would go a long way. I combined those things and also added a way for servers to quickly find what they were looking for with icons, check for allergens with a filter, and also view the ingredients in each menu item. Below is a peek inside my sketchbook with some early wireframes. I used Sketch to build the prototype and InVision to stitch them together as a tour.
Below are some of the wireframes seen in the walkthrough.
Making simple changes like these could really improve the system and shorten the time it takes for new users of Aloha to adjust, making them faster and improving both their experience while at work and the customers.