Why I’m a Designer
Whenever I tell people who know me as a designer that I'm working on a restaurant, I get some puzzled looks. "Don't you make web sites or you're in tech or something?", their expressions seem to say. Yes, and the web is simply a medium. What I'm fundamentally interested in as a designer is the experience that people have when interacting with one another and how the intermediary systems can help or hinder those interactions.
Restaurants and the web are more similar than you'd initially think. Paul Ford pointed out that the web is a customer service medium - so is a restaurant. Everyone has their opinion and certainly doesn't hold back. (see Yelp and every food blog ever.) It's not called the hospitality industry for nothing! Ultimately you are accountable to your users/customers, because they will certainly vote with their feet if they don't like what you're doing.
The same questions arise in both mediums. What happens when someone uses an interface I've designed? How does the person on the receiving end interpret it? Was the message communicated successfully? The design process provides a set of tools to gauge success and come up with solutions to make improvements.
For instance, we want to offer counter service in the morning and afternoon and then switch to table service in the evening. This decision came about after observing that our potential customers modify their eating habits depending on the time of day. In the morning and for lunch it's mostly people on the run, in between activities or on their way to work. In the evening, people are unwinding and socializing, they certainly don't want to stand in line. However, switching service modes is unusual for most restaurants and there isn't a shorthand way to convey that.
How can we design the space and signage to be flexible enough to switch between the two modes of service and to make it clear upon a glance what to do when you enter the space at any given time? I constantly have to examine the interface and imagine the experience from the other side. Honing my sense of empathy is an essential part of being a designer and part of why I was attracted to the discipline in the first place.
When I think about a restaurant as a number of interlocking systems, I get ridiculously excited. A menu seems simple but it's not at all! It's not just the visual design of the menu, it's how the items on the menu are broken down into their components, how the prep kitchen organizes the production of those components, where the components are sourced from, if those items are even seasonally available, how to price the menu item, how the item is described on the menu, if customers understand what the item is, and the placement of the item on the menu. All of these things can be implicitly or explicitly communicated to customers and will color the overall experience. And tweaking any of these variables could drastically affect how well any given item sells, and making decisions based on collecting data and feedback can make or break the business.
Without a doubt I love that the design process fosters a spirit of collaboration. A tight-knit team that has good lines of communication is required for all of these projects regardless if it's a web site or a restaurant. The best projects happen when everyone feels empowered to make a significant contribution, and the systems you've designed are nothing without a team behind it. Design brings observation, empathy, and collaboration into a single process where we can put something worthwhile into the world. In the end, the form isn't as important as the relationships that these systems help build.
