Last night my wife and I went to a local BBQ restaurant, Bandana’s, for dinner. When the waitress came to our table it was quite easy to notice that she was planning on taking our order using a mini Tablet PC. Being an interaction designer and user experience practitioner I was intrigued and started asking her about the device. how it help her taking orders, and how well it performed. Her two complaints were that when she tabs the screen, with a stylus mind you not her finger, it doesn’t register it all the time and it crashes all the time.

An example of what the device looked like, minus all the extra ‘rugged’ features:

My curiosity sated, we started to give her our dinner order. Luck be hold, as she is typing in my lunch rib platter the system crashes and starts to shut down. As she slings it back around her shoulder to reach for her trusty pen and paper, I notice the classic Windows XP shut down screen. Way to go Microsoft!

The real problem with the interaction design and the actual product design isn’t the fact that the device was HUGE and bulky or that it required a stylus to directly tab in our order. The problem is that the server is being forced to use something that does not support their standard method of taking guest’s orders. Many servers will use a mnemonic system when recording what their guests want to eat. Great servers can perfect this art to the point where they don’t even need to write anything down. How many times have you had a server take a table of 10′s order without writing something down, and everything coming out right?

These mnemonic systems are normally passed down from trainer to trainee when someone geta hired on at a restaurant. This means that the system is normally a standard for the servers at a particular location. My proposed interaction design for a handheld device that is used in a restaurant environment is one that can be setup by the restaurant managers to support the mnemonic system that they already have in place, and allow the servers to quickly input and submit orders when serving guests. Based on the details that were set up in the system, it can translate the mnemonic short hand into full order descriptions so the cooking staff knows exactly what to make.

The device to handle this type of interaction can therefore be small and easily fit in the palm of a server’s hand. It would still require a stylus for input, but the stylus would be used just as a pen would, making it feel more natural. Servers would write the shorthand ‘codes’ into the handheld and the only button pushing that needs to occur is when they submit the order or are initiating a new one.

If a system like this were in place, it would support the way servers have been taking food orders for decades and align directly with their mental model and goals.