The question
My MSc dissertation in Business Information System Management at Middlesex University London, submitted in September 2022. It asks how a restaurant could run its policies, its team and its stock from one system, and what that system should look like.
Research
- Case studies of two London restaurants, Leadbelly's and Drunch, comparing how each one runs.
- Interviews with general managers, each 30 minutes to an hour, in September 2022.
- Observation of how information moves around a working restaurant.
- A questionnaire for staff about training, communication with management and the tools they use, such as the till.
- A comparison of three existing systems: NCR Aloha POS, POSist and Toast.
Findings
The managers tied their success to service and quality, and talked about a system that could cover everything from writing policies to running the team. Whether staff took up new technology depended most on how management led the change and how much the team was involved. One manager saw formal training as an unnecessary cost for a small restaurant.
The prototype
I designed the system in Adobe XD, with Marvel and Figma alongside. It has three parts: team management, product and inventory, and communication between staff and managers. I worked from user stories, scenarios and a concept map, through sketches and low-, mid- and high-fidelity wireframes, and checked the design against Jakob Nielsen's usability principles.
Limits
The study rests on a small number of restaurants and on managers' own views of their systems, so the findings may not hold across the UK. The dissertation suggests testing the system further and connecting it to the till and the kitchen display.
