Billing Experience at a Leading Restaurant Chain

In 2013, Bogotá-based restaurant group WOK / Lao Kao partnered with a graduate design-thinking team from Universidad de los Andes to re-imagine the table-closure and billing stage across its 19 full-service locations. The students carried out immersive front- and back-of-house research, mapping every step of the existing workflow to inform later prototypes.

Fieldwork revealed a tangle of pain points: wait-staff made multiple “vueltas” between table, POS, and a single crowded cashier desk, queues built up, data-entry errors crept in, and staff worried about unpaid bills, lost tips, and time stolen from other duties. The bottleneck stressed both employees and diners.

Rapid in-situ prototypes removed one full trip by combining bill- and voucher-printing, introduced modular cash trays to keep each check organized, added single-tap POS shortcuts, and slipped playful server-name cards into every bill. Pilot tests showed faster payments, fewer mix-ups, and improved guest connection; the low-cost tweaks were adopted in the pilot outlet and subsequently rolled out chain-wide.