Thru — A complete restaurant operating system
An all-in-one restaurant management system: customer pre-booking, waiter and kitchen control panels, and operational reports.
- Client
- Thru App
- Year
- 2020
- Role
- Senior Product Designer — UX & UI
- Industry
- Foodtech
Overview
Thru is an all-in-one restaurant management system that gives owners a suite of smart applications to streamline operations. Customers can pre-book and pre-order to skip the wait. Waiters manage tables and orders. The kitchen receives orders in real time. Owners get reports that surface what to fix next.
The problem
Restaurants were juggling three disconnected tools — a POS, a waitlist app, and pen-and-paper kitchen tickets. Orders fell through the cracks, customers waited longer, and owners had no real visibility into where time was lost.
Process
- Shadowed waiters, kitchen staff, and managers across three restaurants
- Mapped the order journey from customer tap to plate to bill
- Designed three coordinated apps that share one source of truth
- Prototyped kitchen displays for high-glance, low-error reading
- Built a reports module focused on the metrics owners actually act on
The solution
Three connected surfaces: a customer app for pre-booking and ordering, a waiter control panel for tables and orders, a kitchen display tuned for speed and clarity, and an owner dashboard that turns service data into operational reports.
Outcome
- Walk-in wait times reduced through pre-booking and pre-order
- Kitchen errors dropped with high-contrast, single-glance order tickets
- Owners stopped guessing — reports showed exactly where service slowed
Heuristic evaluation
Applied Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics to identify friction and ship targeted fixes.
Finding · Kitchen staff couldn't tell which orders were new, in-progress, or late.
Fix · Colour-coded order tickets with elapsed-time counters readable from across the kitchen.
Finding · Waiters had no way to undo an accidental table-clear.
Fix · Soft-delete with a 5-second undo toast on every destructive action.
Finding · Customer, waiter, and kitchen apps used different status names.
Fix · Shared status vocabulary and design tokens across all three surfaces.
Finding · Frequent orders required full re-entry every time.
Fix · Waiter shortcuts, repeat-last-order, and saved combos for high-volume tables.
App screens
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