Take-out Interfaces

17 March 2004

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.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ waylman: I want a takeout place like this near my home! Why? Because I don’t like phones for the very same reasons.
§ Chris Vincent: I’m in the US, but I’ve never seen such a great process as this. However, Pizza Hut does have a great online ordering system.
§ Dave: Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a business having a system like this. I imagine most US businesses are too lazy to implement something like this.
§ amanda: My local pizza resturant has been doing this for a while, and the system obviously tracks the orders. They already know what pizza I’ll have, and that I tend to add a random dessert to the order.
§ Jesse Rodgers: The first really successful online ordering I know of in Canada is:

http://pizzapizza.ca/

Works like a charm and they have been doing it for years.

But that phone number recognition stuff is used by all pizza places and some other take out places. It is a little scary though when they know your name and your order when they pick up the phone ;)

..and yes UK take out people are much more… well honest about their jobs. At least you get some sort of hint if they did something to your food.
§ Tim: One of our local taxi firms (in Bath) has a similar system. Once you’ve used them, they relate your name to your phone number and greet you when you call. I guess they’d have to purge old data to satisfy the DPA, though…
§ Eric: Here in Kansas City, most places that have any system at all base it on your phone number(which they ask for). I do very much like the ordering off the menu by numbers that you mention.

Also I’d like it if more places delivered. Currently I have to go pick up 90% of what I order.

What I’d love is an online system that would let me pick the time of delivery far in advance. It would be great if my Thai food just showed up every Sunday at 8:00 pm. Keep my card on record and just bill me every month. (God I’m lazy)
§ Jennifer Grucza: Don’t most Chinese food places number their dishes? At least here in the US, I think they do. Though they still let you order by name.

I think a website ordering system would be even better.
§ rotoass: one time I order at waiter.com and take my girlfriend. we get to carrows and we were treated like vip! we had table waiting and they brought food out to us right away! I don’t use it all the time but it’s nice service.. and they do have that kind of service here in the states with repeat customers =] we order out alot
§ janeca: here in costa rica. they got a pretty neat system too. they ask u if ur first time customer, so they will register you into their system. when u call again,u just have to give ur phone number or name. and this saves soooo much time explaining my work address.(imagine streets with no street signs, and uses addresses like 50 meters west, Grey Building on the Left, etc.)—:)
§ nate: hehe i work at pizzapizza! you would be suprized, alot of places do have the databases set up. but the more main stream, hence corperations need to follow the privicy act more closly, as they are being watched more closly. i would love to get a customer calling in and be all freindly and read the address to them instead of asking them to repeat it over and over, however it could be dangerous. a abusive husband could call in and simply give that number, and ask for the address and track down his ex-wife. people are verfy resoursfull and will lie to get any thing they want, as you all probely know.

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