Arshia Sadr-Al-ZakerinDECISION 01
The pager is software, not hardware
Hardware pagers were the expensive part of the brief. Building the pager into the menu meant the café pays nothing extra when waiters or tables are added or removed: the system scales for free.
All work
CASE STUDY - 02
Café Shahrzad
A digital menu with the pager built in - plus waiter, cashier, and admin panels that run a large café.
01 - OVERVIEW
What it is.
Café Shahrzad is a large café and restaurant that wanted to stand out. A space that size cannot run without a pager system, and hardware pagers were too expensive. So we put the pager inside the digital menu itself: customers call the waiter from inside the menu. When the café adds or removes waiters or tables, it costs them nothing.
The system has four panels: the customer menu, the waiter panel with a live call feed, the admin panel that watches everything live, and the cashier panel that closes the loop. I was the product designer; my colleague Mehdi built the front-end and back-end in custom code.
02 - CHALLENGE
Four users, one rush hour, no room for error.
The hardest constraints were physical, not visual. The web app had to talk to the café's printers. The cashier had to see, at a glance, which table each order belonged to - and new orders on a table could never mix with the previous ones before settlement.
Then the humans: waiters working in rush conditions who could not afford to get lost in the UI; customers of every age who had to use the menu - and understand that the call-waiter button lives inside the app, not on a device on the table.
03 - PROCESS
How it was designed.
/ 01
Discover
Went to the café, watched how it runs, and asked what they actually wanted, before anything was promised.
/ 02
Propose
Delivered a proposal, then went back over it ourselves and added features the café hadn't asked for but genuinely needed. They worked.
/ 03
System first
Built the design tokens and the design system before drawing a single screen, so four panels could stay consistent.
/ 04
Design by priority
Customer panel first, then waiter and cashier, then admin. The customers came first, so their panel did too.
04 - KEY DECISIONS
Decisions, not screens.
DECISION 02
Route the ticket, don't rewrite it
The café has three departments: bar, kitchen, and service. After the waiter confirms an order, the ticket splits itself: espresso to the bar, pizza to the kitchen, hookah to service. One consolidated ticket goes to the cashier, and nobody retypes anything.
DECISION 03
Mobile for the floor, desktop for the office
Customers and waiters are mobile-only: research showed nobody scans a QR code with a laptop, and a waiter needs the phone in hand to follow up fast. The cashier and admin also get desktop versions, because they sit still and watch everything.
DECISION 04
Dark and light, because the café has a courtyard
The menu had to work outdoors in daylight and at night, so both modes were designed from the start, not added later.
DECISION 05
A table is an identity
Every table gets a system-issued code for its QR. When a customer scans and checks in, the waiter knows exactly which table called, and new orders can never merge with previous unsettled ones on the same table.
05 - SELECTED SCREENS
The work.
06 - OUTCOMES
What changed.
Adopted by the staff
Night one was slow. From night two, the staff ran the whole system with zero extra explanation. Better than we expected.
One system, four panels
Customer menu, waiter, cashier, and admin shipped as one product: built-in pager, automatic order routing to three departments, live staff oversight, and settlement.
Zero hardware cost
The pager lives inside the menu, so adding or removing waiters and tables costs the café nothing.
07 - REFLECTION
What it taught me.
This project taught me more soft skills than design skills: how to land a freelance project of my own, how to work with my colleague, how to sit with challenges instead of running from them.
I learned to change the path without hurting the UX. When we hit a technical limit, like connecting the web app to the printers, the answer was never to cut the experience. It was to find another route to the same experience.
I learned that the proposal is only the start. We went back after delivering it and added features the café never asked for but genuinely needed, and they worked.
And I learned to design for the worst moment, not the best one: a waiter in a rush, a cashier with a full house, a customer who has never used a digital menu. If it works for them, it works for everyone.