Ordering food over the phone can be tricky. Typically all the best take-out places are run by folk who learned their craft in distant countries and for whom English is not their first language. Add to that the noise from busy kitchens and a selection of hard-to-pronounce dishes, and placing an order can be a real nightmare. Not to mention the fact that I’m a geek, and by my very nature I hate using phones at the best of times. (Who knows how to work those things anyway?)

I have, however, been very impressed with how my local Chinese take-out place has focussed its efforts on making orders easy to place. They’ve carefully considered and designed the customer interface and made optimizations in a number of key areas.

First off is the menu itself. Every item on the menu has a number as usual, but at the bottom of each page is a specific instruction – Please order by number. By making numbers the default mechanism for placing an order, they let the customer off the hook by not forcing them to try any pronounce dish names to be ‘authentic’.

Another useful note on the menu instructs give us your house number and post code. Ok, so that’s cool, I don’t have to battle to spell out my street name. More importantly, it gives me some idea of what to expect when I call up. I know how the conversation’s going to go – they’ll ask for my post code and house number, and then I’ll order items by number. Cool.

Now, the really great stuff happens when you call up as a repeat customer. They obviously have some smart database hooked up to the caller-id as all they have to do is greet you, take the order by numbers, and then confirm the address back to you. Easy. Obvious. So why don’t more businesses do this?

I guess in the States this kind of service is probably more commonplace, as the USA has a much more service-oriented culture than the UK. If a shop assistant told me to have a nice day I’d probably assume they were being sarcastic and would check to make sure they hadn’t just crapped in my lunch. But smart use of technology and more considered use of design is something we could certainly benefit from more of.