A modernisation of a 20 year old application for over 16000 hospitality businesses across the United Kingdom.
Role: Lead UX/UI designer
Dates: April 2024 - present
When I arrived at Zonal, they were in the middle of a large-scale cloud transformation to bring their current suite of products into the cloud, update the user experience and create a more consistent experience.
I was working on the nascent Aztec+ app, a modern redesign of Aztec, a 20 year old point of sale (POS) product that’s still sold by Zonal today. The goal of Aztec+ as a fundamental part of the cloud transformation is to create an app that can function across a ton of different devices with a level of consistency and familiarity across the other Zonal apps while maintaining similar performance to the old app.
The first thing I noticed is the way of navigating around the product menus to add products to be slow. Consider the scenario of a server in a busy bar when a guest comes up to order food and drinks for 4 people. In that scenario you’d have to swap between the drinks and food section 8 separate times. Simply put the menu is great for a guest facing application where you want a guest to explore the whole menu offering, but when it comes to speed this is too slow for a busy bar and could end up costing precious time.
Say an order takes 40 seconds to take an order for 4 meals and 4 drinks, and on a busy night you take 250 orders. That would equate to over 2 hours and 40 minutes simply entering orders into the POS.
By reducing that time by 8 seconds you can save up to 27 minutes of which could be spent service other guests, preparing drinks or providing better service.
The process
The crux of this slow interaction is the swipe motion to navigate between different sections of the menu. So to improve this I set about returning to the roots of POS interactions by having buttons to tap on as you would expect in most current POS apps. This would also allow us to support a gesture-less interface (where swipe functions are either incredibly slow or don’t work on old tills, as this was another requirement) while also providing familiarity to users.
Initial exploration helped me define a system that could be used across multiple devices, sizes and venue contexts. This system will enable multiple menus and can be applied across different venues who want to customise their set up with their preferences. Say one venue is a wine bar and wants a set up with 10 different menus of wine or a whisky bar with 100 different whiskeys in their menu the system would allow them to get what they need from the menu.
The solution
From this I developed a high fidelity prototype that could be tested in a real life situation with a small number of customers to validate the choices. The testing provided simple validation and allowed us to improve the mobile version by swapping the side of the floating action button.
The design is a simple solution that allows the user to select a drinks or food menu (or whatever menus they have set up) and from that a sub menu category in two simple taps. Further sub categories can be added on the page to break categories up if the user desires. With distinctive interactions between tablet and mobile that creates consistency while also maximising the screen real estate on a smaller mobile device.
As part of the system design a new quick action bar has been introduced that allows users to change a portion, quantity or add additional items together. This quick action serves to bring together other actions into one place, organise the menu on screen and provide more space for the menu to be shown.
The results
With confirmation from the users, I got the product and engineering team to take a look and feedback some more before moving to the implementation stage.
When implemented we hope to see the times taken to make a simple order improve by 8 seconds which could make a 5.3 hour saving over a shift where 2400 orders are made. While also improving the overall experience of additional actions, we have yet to see the results.
