Brightloom: Kitchen display software
Background
Our OpsMan software supports all work that happens in the restaurant kitchen—everything from receiving, building, and troubleshooting customer orders to managing menu items. It also interacts with the Brightloom platform technology that includes our pickup and omni-channel ordering products. Because each restaurant brand has a slightly different way of setting up their operational workflows, we must design solutions that can adapt to fit most use cases.
Audience
Goals
Increase throughput
Increase accuracy
Approach
Designing for back of house is a very unique and challenging experience because the kitchen is a place that’s very cramped, hot, loud, and chaotic. Our team went into the kitchen and worked ‘the line’ to build empathy for store employees by understanding their goals, the problems they face, what aspects of their process work well, and what can be improved. Our learnings made clear that they work on a multitude of things at a time, race against the clock, and always find themselves thinking ahead about what should be done in the moment to prevent headaches an hour later.
These design principles emerged:
Efficiency
Optimize for speed, designing for fast, effortless, and intentional interactions
Actionability
Provide clear understanding of what needs to be done and when
Clarity
Serve up content that is digestible and unambiguous
Flexibility
Scale to meet and accommodate differences in operational workflows
Because of the kitchen environment, the team leaned on simple, functional design to ease cognitive load, help increase speed of service, and improve accuracy of orders.
This included the use of:
Stoplight colors as a universal language
Color coding orders makes it easy for operators to understand the state of the kitchen, what things might be taking too long (red), and what things are ready for customers (green)
Larger text sizes
Legibility at a distance to help prioritize and organize workload in the most efficient way possible
Sound
Sounds alert employees they have a new order to work on; therefore, they can multitask and know when a new order has been received that they need to work on
Simple screen gestures
The most basic screen interactions enable anyone to use our software with little to no training - doing everything is as easy as tapping to start and tapping to end. There are no complicated interactions like dragging and swiping to perform core actions - someone with zero to almost zero experience with technology are able to use the product.
The design might seem exaggerated compared to traditional consumer design but is very intentional because kitchen displays are at arms length, might not be at eye level and compete with the distractions in the environment.
The solution
We designed two different versions of a fulfillment interface: ‘carousel view’ and ‘tiles view.’ Carousel view mode works for restaurants with highly customizable entrees where employees need to concentrate on one task at a time before moving on to the next. Tiles view mode works for restaurants with little to no order customization or ‘grab and go’ type food items. Moving seamlessly from order to order and seeing an entire order queue visually is at the heart of tiles view. The product is flexible in that both modes can be used by one restaurant depending on the needs of the station.
Results
Throughput: 500 orders per hour (150 industry average)