Revel Systems: Front to Back
Redesigning both sides of Revel's point-of-sale platform — the iOS app frontline employees use under pressure, and the back office operators spend hours in every day. Two different users, one cohesive design vision.
One Platform, Two Very Different Users
Revel Systems is an iPad-based point-of-sale platform used by restaurants, retail stores, and other businesses. As Lead Product Designer at Revel, I was responsible for both the iOS POS and the Back Office. That dual scope shaped everything — because you can't design the front without understanding what's driving it from the back.
My Role
Lead Product Designer across both the iOS POS and Back Office redesigns. The iOS redesign was developed in direct partnership with Apple, which set the quality bar we held ourselves to.
Designing for the Rush
Point-of-sale software is a different design problem than most. Frontline employees — servers, cashiers, baristas — are using the product under real pressure: a line at the counter, a table waiting, a customer standing right in front of them. Speed and clarity aren't nice-to-haves. They're the product.
Revel's iOS POS had become the market leader in the iPad POS category, but the interface reflected its origins — built feature by feature, optimized for capability over usability. The redesign was an opportunity to take everything that worked and build an experience around it that frontline workers could actually use under fire.
What We Were Hearing
- New staff training times were long — the interface required too much memorization
- High-traffic periods exposed how slow common actions were — modifying an order, splitting a check, applying a discount all took too many steps
- Error rates were high — unclear affordances led to accidental taps and costly mistakes
Design Principles for Frontline Work
The most frequent actions should require as few interactions as possible. Every additional step multiplies across thousands of daily transactions.
In a busy environment, employees can't stop and read. The interface needs to communicate at a glance through hierarchy, iconography, and spatial memory.
In a real service environment, recovering from a mistake is expensive. Design to prevent errors, not just to handle them gracefully.
I spent time in restaurants and retail stores watching how employees actually used the existing POS under real conditions. The modifier system — where most POS complexity lives — was rebuilt to surface the most-used options first and handle complex customizations more intuitively.
Redesigning the Engine Room
While frontline employees use the POS for minutes at a time, operators often have the Back Office open for hours. Menu management, inventory, employee scheduling, sales reporting — it all lives there. When I joined Revel, the Back Office was showing its age: grown organically over years, adding features without a unified design vision, and making operators spend more time fighting the interface than running their business.
Core Operator Pain Points
- Navigation was confusing — users often couldn't find settings or features without trial and error
- High-frequency tasks required too many clicks — menu updates, inventory adjustments, and report pulls were slow and friction-heavy
- The information architecture reflected the system's internal structure rather than how operators thought about their business
- Inconsistent patterns across sections made the product feel like multiple products stitched together
Aligning the Product to the Mental Model
I rebuilt the navigation structure around jobs-to-be-done rather than system categories. I also built a foundational component library — establishing consistent patterns for forms, tables, modals, and data visualization across the entire product.
The Design Question
How do you redesign a complex, feature-rich enterprise tool to feel coherent, fast, and intuitive — without losing the power users who depend on its depth?
What Shipped
The iOS POS launched as a major version update developed in partnership with Apple. The Back Office redesign shipped in phases — starting with navigation and dashboard, then rolling through menu management, inventory, and employee management.
Impact
- iOS POS: reduced average taps to complete a common transaction, shortened new employee onboarding time, reduced error rates in modifier-heavy orders
- iOS onboarding achieved 83% walkthrough effectiveness and 92% sign-up completion
- Back Office usability testing cut product creation time ~40%
- Back Office component library became the reference point for all subsequent feature development
Designing both sides of a platform taught me that you can't fully understand one without the other. The operator who sets up the menu in the Back Office is directly shaping what the server sees on the POS floor. Design decisions that seem isolated are never really isolated.
- Frontline workers deserve the same design quality as consumers — speed and clarity aren't luxuries, they're the product
- Enterprise users deserve the same design quality as consumers — being paid to use a tool doesn't make friction acceptable
- Information architecture is product strategy — how you organize a product determines what users can accomplish and how fast
- Contextual research isn't optional — you can't design for a restaurant rush by sitting at a desk
"The people using this product are doing real work under real pressure. A restaurant manager who loses 20 minutes a day fighting their back office software loses 120 hours a year. Good design doesn't just feel better — it gives people that time back."