When reflecting upon this project, I feel like it was fun and horrible at the same time. I got very carried away in the functionality of my tablet app, and became borderline obsessed with thinking through every aspect of my project as a functioning application and if it would work properly if it was instantly coded. One of the biggest challenges I faced was the size constraints we are dealing with. For me to create a whole application that encompasses nearly every aspect of what a restaurant server does on the the computer, combined with our entire menu, and then to present it in a way without feeling jumbled and crowded was pretty difficult. This is why I instantly had to decide that a smart phone was out of the picture, and that my project had to be tailored specifically for a tablet, simply because of the amount of information that needs to be presented.
Another issue that I thought a lot about was the overall appearance of this app. This is an application that is purely designed to be seen by servers at restaurants, and none of them care if the app is pretty looking or not. Simplicity and functionality are the two biggest factors in my mind. Can the server quickly navigate through this program and ring in different tables and different orders while impatient people are waiting. The server doesn’t need any pretty pictures or cool looks to this app, they just need it to be straight forward and fast. That being said, obviously I wasn’t about to make a bare-bones, wireframe looking application. Just because this app is exclusively for servers, doesnt mean that a customer won’t catch a glance of it, so I created a theme for this app that I feel sums up the overall theme/feel/genre of Outback Steakhouse (where I work), but this theme/color scheme could be swapped out depending on the restaurant. I didn’t deal too much with typography and choosing fonts, I just wanted to use fonts that read very quickly and are extremely simple for the server.
Overall, the hardest part of this project for me was designing the overall layout, and menu scheme. Because I have so much information to present, I had to start thinking about different menus and submenus, and I am actually pretty proud of the result. Again, the functionality of this was the most important part of designing this, and I am fairly confident that after a one-two minute tutorial, every person I work with could figure this out.
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