Everyone Waiter

Everyone Waiter is a restaurant operations service for small restaurant owners, staff, and customers in Korea. It runs the entire visit in one system: waitlist, menu management, table ordering, POS, and payment.

Owners manage multiple locations from a single account. Customers join the waitlist and order without downloading an app.

Client

Team Side Project

Year

2026

Project type

Product Design / Web POS / Kiosk

Credits

Product Strategy, UX Research, Prototyping

Challenge

Self ordering spread fast. Its problems spread with it.

Self-ordering adoption among Korean restaurants grew from 0.6% in 2017 to 12.9% in 2024.
But the tools arrived as separate services. Waitlist, menu administration, table ordering,
and POS each with its own system, subscription, and device.

Owners entered the same information into each one, staff switched between screens, and the costs stacked
for a ten table restaurant, table ordering fees alone could reach about KRW 3.6 million a year.

Customers did not have it easier. In a Korea Consumer Agency survey, 46.6% of kiosk users reported inconvenience or difficulty, most often pressure from the queue behind them and complicated controls.

Research

The problem was not a lack of tools, but the work between them

Market and competitor research showed that owners and customers already had plenty of digital tools.
The findings were about what those tools cost the people using them.

The real problem was that these tools worked independently.

Owners entered the same information again and again, while customers faced unfamiliar interfaces, unnecessary steps, and little visibility into their own status.

Owner and staff

Owners juggled multiple tools and subscriptions. Entered every menu change in each one, and struggled to oversee more than one location.

Customer

Customers could not see where they stood on the waitlist, were pushed toward app downloads and sign ups, and wrestled with menu options.

How might we?

How might we run the whole visit, from waitlist to payment, on one shared structure, while keeping every step usable for the least digitally confident customer?

My Role

I designed the service structure and every surface that runs on it

I worked across market research, competitive analysis, information architecture, user flows, interface design, and prototyping.

The structural decision was the core of the work: an owner facing management system and a customer facing ordering flow built on one shared data structure, so menu and operational information stays consistent from waitlist notification to POS.

Key Contributions

Market and competitor research

Service structure and information architecture

Waitlist and notification flows

Category and menu management

Table ordering and POS payments

Accessible interface design

Category and menu management

Table ordering and POS payments

Accessible interface design

Key Solutions

One shared structure, three groups it serves

Everyone Waiter is built so information entered once serves everyone, the owner managing it, the staff acting on it, and the customer reading it.

Key Solution 01
Enter information once, every surface uses it.
Owners register and manage multiple locations from a single account, each with its own waitlist, menus, tables, orders, and payment settings.
When a menu or category is created, it appears across the waitlist notification, customer menu, and POS at once. That removes repeated data entry, and with it the quiet errors that come from maintaining the same menu in three separate tools.
Design Principle
Information entered once should not need to be entered again.
Key Solution 02
A party size and a phone number. Nothing to install.
A party size and a phone number. Nothing to install.
The interface is built for the least confident person in line. Large text, generous touch targets, one clear action per screen, visible confirmation, and steps that can be undone. Here, accessibility is not polish. It decides who can use the restaurant at all.
Design Principle
The person least comfortable with screens sets the bar for every screen.
Key Solution 03
Tables, orders, and payments in one workspace.
Staff see table status, order contents, and payment state in a single POS workspace instead of switching screens mid rush. Menu options, order edits, discounts, table transfers, kitchen resends, payments, and cancellations all run from the same place.
High impact actions, such as cancellations and table transfers, ask for confirmation first. In a busy service, one mistaken tap can cost a table's entire order. The confirmation trades a second for that risk.
Design Principle
Speed for routine actions, friction for irreversible ones.

Dashboard for writers

Outcome

Prototype validation showed gains in usability and operations

7 → 3 steps
Core ordering flow

83% fewer
Order entry errors

KRW 200K
Estimated monthly labor savings

4 in 1
wait, menu, order, and pay in one product

0 downloads
Required for customers

Reflection

Good automation does not remove people. It frees them for the moments that need them.

his project showed me that digital transformation in restaurants cannot be won on cost reduction alone. A sustainable service has to cut repetitive work for owners without shutting out customers who find the technology unfamiliar. Operational efficiency and accessibility turned out to be one design problem, not two competing goals.

Shared data carried its own lesson: when a single entry feeds every surface, accuracy and clear system states matter more, not less. And a real dining room is full of exceptions the happy path ignores. Payment failures, missed notifications, changed orders, and staff mistakes, each needing a designed recovery.

The next step is to test the product in working restaurants, with staff under real rush conditions
and customers across different levels of digital confidence.

Next project

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