Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

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> People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems and they keep underestimating the flexibility of the old models.

Related to this, but in a completely different context, I have had similar thoughts lately when eating out at restaurants in Spain. It's incredibly frustrating from a customer's point of view when the waiter taking your group's order has to use a newfangled tablet or phone-like device and tap through each individual order, often depending on the peculiarities of the app's UI and how the designers expect the process to carry out: “Are you all having the set menu? No? OK, first I need to know how many of you are having it?" [taps count on screen] "Right, now I need the starters but ONLY for the set menu orders..." etcetera—you get the idea. Then, while going through this unnecessarily slow process, God forbid someone who ordered from the set menu wants to change their main while the waiter is already taking the à la carte orders.

Meanwhile, in restaurants that haven't unnecessarily techified the procesz, the waiter can take the order in the way that's most practical given the circumstances and that best fits his way of taking notes. Ah, but then how does the order reach the kitchen without the tech? I have no idea, all I can say is that it worked fine before these things were put in place, and the manual system is by far the quickest and most flexible from a customer's point of view.

Classic business process mistake of trying to change a verbal contract into a form-letter.

"I'd like a quarter pounder with cheese and fries" is utterly unacceptable for buying a house or taking out a car loan, but it's the ideal way to order lunch. The people marketing, designing, and writing the application software have never worked in the business, of course, lack of experience has never made people like that pause, so they have peculiar ideas resulting in enforcement of weird and unproductive business processes.

Exactly why I cannot stand using the kiosks to order food at a fast-food restaurant. They take what used to be a five-second process to verbally state an order, and turn it into a multi-minute agony of taps, reading, canceling suggested upsells, etc. before finally getting to completion.

I guess the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore. And then they wonder why their year-over-year sales are declining.

Our nearest McDonalds has a Siri-like virtual assistant thing taking orders at the drive-through. They've had to add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects them to say to end the order. If you order anything with a number in the name, it may give you that many of it instead of one of it. I don't know how well it does at modifying mistakes but I'd bet the answer is "it can't, it just tells you to pull forward and talk to a real person".

It sucks.

And yeah, the damn order-kiosks manage to take saying the words "large black coffee" and turn it into a two-minute process.

Like "automated" checkouts, they're not automation, they're just making customers do more work than paid workers used to, to achieve the same outcome. The work's still happening, and is less efficient, the businesses just aren't having to pay for it. That's not automation.

> They've had to add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects them to say to end the order.

Voice assistants are still stuck at that 90% point of "good enough to be impressive, bad enough to not work in practice". The selling point of free-form voice recognition is that you don't have to learn the language of the computer. I still believe this is bullshit. You have to do it anyway, but there are no references for it. Hell, even the developers don't know what the "language of the computer" is, because it's defined as "whatever the ML model doesn't choke on".

It would be much better if we stuck to structured natural-language queries with controlled vocabulary[0]. People would quickly pick up on it, and even if it sounded a bit artificial (not much worse than interacting with voice assistants sounds anyway), it would at least work.

> Like "automated" checkouts, they're not automation, they're just making customers do more work than paid workers used to, to achieve the same outcome. The work's still happening, and is less efficient, the businesses just aren't having to pay for it. That's not automation.

The older I get the more I see it, that it's literally most software in a nutshell. Starting with Office suite - yes, the word processors, calendars and spreadsheets - that killed dedicated secretarial jobs and distributed the work they did evenly across everyone.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary

> and turn it into a multi-minute (...) suggested upsells

This is how the restaurant chain deploying those kiosks sees it.

> the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore

This is self-correcting over time, as more and more places adopt such systems. It's just another supplier-driven market. Fast-food restaurant meals are not really commodities. If I'm in a mood for, say, a McDonald's cheeseburger, there is no other vendor I can get it from[0], so I'm going to suffer through the kiosk experience. It's calibrated to be just about bearable enough that I'm not going to skip the meal because of it.

Everything seems to become more and more like this, in every market - burgers, fridges, cars, phones, webapps, everything. As annoying and abusive as possible without making it a deal-breaker, offered on a supplier-driven market, so the non-annoying, non-abusive alternatives don't exist.

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[0] - Yes, Burger King next door may have similar cheeseburgers, but they feel and taste different enough to be non-substitutable. But even if, guess what, they also have those stupid kiosks.

Market for lemons, or the old saying about bad money always pushes out the good money.

For another example see touch-screen automotive UIs, universally hated by everyone except the bean counters, so we're stuck with them forever.

Also WRT the BK next door, its probably 5 minutes away by car or 30 minutes away on foot, which explains the corporate push toward "Walkable cities" and so forth. At my last onsite office job, there was a deli on the first floor and we were essentially captive customers; in theory there were plenty of places to walk within a half hour walk, but in practice its raining and 40 degrees so we were forced to shop at the company store, so to speak.

The trade off isn't in terms of the order, it's that you get back the time waiting in line behind several very slow people.

You can also order in the app from the comfort of your home, car, bus, sidewalk, thereby skipping the "standing and huffing at the kiosk" scene entirely.

When I was in Israel almost every fast-food resturant had a kiosk like that, and they were all super easy to use and responsive. This might partially be an implementation problem.

Here in BC, Canada, many places don't even provide you a menu. You're expected to scan a QR code on the table, then use the website it leads you to. So the table fumbles around with their phones, using a website that usually has a terrible UX, and then the server arrives and enters your order on their tablet.

At least they don't require that we install an App. But I'm sure someone's thinking that would be a good idea.

QR codes mean there are no menus to clean off.

It also means analytics for everyone at the table, not just the person who paid and not only their credit card number.

It also means they can data-mine you and upsell you crap. The tech stack is outsourced to some shady third party, and you either get a shitty webapp, or a PDF not suitable for mobile, because the restaurants still occasionally need the paper menu, and why do the work twice.

That's just shitty software though. Good software gets out of the way and improves something. We could speculate on how to fix that scenario, but there's probably no incentive - in my experience there are fixations amongst tech people on profit-less ideas that end up getting squeezed awkwardly into applications such as bill splitting, digital ordering etc.

I completely agree. Software Engineers are no less prone to “when you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail” as anyone else.

There’s so many things we keep trying to shoehorn tech into that don’t need it— electronic ordering/serving food, planning a small gathering of friends, making a smoothie [1], “smart” fridges/toasters/stoves… these are all adding unnecessary knobs and bobbles to things humanity has gotten by just fine with for ages (the first since the dawn of civilization!)

As a general rule to “will this be tech useful” I think in terms of scale— is this new tech enabling/helping me to do/manage something 10x-100x better than I could with existing tools? Sure, I can organize a single dinner/cocktail party of a couple dozen people via paper invites or text messages and phone calls to caterers, and using tech for that is likely introducing unnecessary overhead, but if I’m a planner organizing many weddings of 100+ for a living then, yeah, obviously a party-planning management software will be of use.

If not, its value is likely not worth the hassle.

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s...

Having been employed in tech for over 20 years, I have found myself leaning further this way over time. The simplest solution is usually the best.

Waiters put the bits of paper they're writing on on a rack in the kitchen. Other times, they shout out the orders and remember which table gets what.

And shreds it all at the end of the day before the tax guy shows up.

Though Quebec, Canada, had such a problem with “zappers” that would delete orders from the electronic system that every restaurant now must be online with the tax authority and every receipt has a tax authority response code on the top.

What upsets me are those dumb QR Code menus. Battery dead? Out of service? No food for you amigo.

Or if you just don’t have a smartphone. Obviously that’s unthinkable though.

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