Brigade’s workflow is successful because of an intense focus to be ruthlessly subtractive. Every part of the interface and how it flows has been rigorously analyzed and tested so there’s no wasted steps. It looks clean and simple because “features” are baked seamlessly into process.
ROCKER SPIRITS
Overview
In past couple years, Denver has exploded. One of the fastest growing cities in the country has attracted many talented restauranteurs as excellent restaurants are quickly becoming the norm. But there was an opening in 2016 that everyone was eagerly anticipating.
Rocker Spirits was started with passion and the love of Whiskey!
“Rocker Spirits was born out of a design of a bottle form an oil can that used to rock back upright after you poured out the oil. Once I made my dream bottle the rest was just great people around great whiskey!” Duston Evans.
Problem: Workflow
Being a fan of elegant simplicity, the Rocker team found it very discouraging that all of the point of sale systems they demoed suffered from congested workflow.
“The legacy systems were the worst when it comes to interface and intuitiveness, but surprisingly the tablet options were just as meandering. We knew we were going to be busy right away, so we couldn’t have our staff wasting time on the POS when they needed to be on the floor. From my experience, a bad workflow leads to significantly more server mistakes. And when a server makes a point of sale mistake, it can lead to very bad situations,” said Duston.
Problem: Workflow
The benefits of clean workflow are:
Increased speed.
Decreased training time.
Decreased user errors.
Increased Speed
In addition to physically saving time by reducing the amount of screens a user has to visit in order to accomplish it’s intended action, there’s also a psychological benefit.
Because of Brigade’s intuitiveness, there’s significantly less memorization of which button’s to press. When you have less memorization, your muscle memory increases and you can fly through the system.
Decreased Training Time
Every restaurant has turnover. Often a lot. It’s not uncommon for servers and bartenders to spend 5-10 hours of training time to learn the complexities of a typical POS system. Reducing your training time to 1 hour could save you anywhere form $30 – $200 per month depending on the size of your restaurant.
Decreased User Error
As any restaurant employee can verify, it’s extremely frustrating when your busy and you know you’re wasting time because of a bad interface. When you’re getting your head kicked in, there’s nothing more annoying than unnecessarily spending extra time at the terminal. (There’s a reason POS means piece of sh*! in the restaurant industry)
And every restaurant manager will verify how many more mistakes occur when their staff is frustrated. As Mr. George stated earlier, when a POS mistake occurs it can lead to a series of compounding new problems.