Aloha Cloud POS

UX Planning

The UX planning phase was initiated by gathering high-level requirements from the product team and conducting kickoff calls with key stakeholders to align on business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility. Early discussions were instrumental in shaping a clear UX roadmap defining what needs to be prioritized and when. Following agile methodologies, we maintained recurring sync-ups with the product team to continuously refine requirements, clarify scope, and translate evolving goals into actionable UX tasks.

Effective planning ensures that design efforts stay aligned with business goals, user needs, and development timelines. My approach to UX planning includes:

• Roadmap Planning
  Define and prioritize UX workstreams within the larger product roadmap, balancing short-term sprint needs with long-term vision.

• Requirement Prioritization
  Facilitate UX check-in calls with product managers to refine, prioritize, and scope requirements for ongoing and upcoming sprints.

• Project Timeline & UX Checklist
  Create clear project timelines, milestones, and internal UX checklists to ensure visibility and accountability across design activities.

• Cross-functional Alignment
  Collaborate with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to align on priorities and manage dependencies early.

• Design Capacity Planning
  Estimate design effort, allocate resources, and track bandwidth across the design team to avoid bottlenecks.

• Risk & Gap Identification
  Identify potential UX gaps or risks in advance and proactively raise them to the team for resolution.

• Documentation & Tracking
  Maintain design documentation, research insights, and decision logs for transparency and easy reference throughout the project lifecycle. A large part of my contribution involved solving systemic design challenges
  
  

Key areas of work:

• Building and refining the design system to bring structure, consistency, and scalability across multiple cross-products.

• Designing with a future-proof lens, ensuring workflows could adapt to new order modes, regulations, and integrations.

• Partnering with product and engineering to transform ambiguous business requirements into intuitive user flows.

• Running user research, prototyping, and usability testing to validate design decisions and reduce friction in adoption.

Selected Complex Features:

• Customer Loyalty Flows – Designed integrated loyalty experiences that connect restaurant POS with customer-facing displays, ensuring both operators and guests benefit from a seamless, engaging flow.
  
  

  

• Guest Check Presenter Mode – Built flexible presenter experiences tailored for different order modes (dine-in, bar, takeout), reducing staff errors and improving guest clarity.

• Complex Split Check – Simplified one of the most challenging POS workflows by creating intuitive split methods (by item, seat, or custom amounts), minimizing training time for staff.

• POS Notifications & Messages – Designed real-time alerts and communication tools within the POS, enabling staff to stay updated on order changes, shift updates, and system events—without disrupting their workflow.

• Conversational Ordering – Introduced natural language-based ordering flows to streamline input speed, reduce cognitive load, and create more human interactions between staff and guests.UX Planning

I actively contributed to writing and shaping UX-specific requirements, ensuring they supported both user experience quality and business value. Throughout the process, our role extended beyond execution as we helped steer conversations toward what the business and product truly needed from a UX standpoint, advocating for scalable, user-centered solutions that align with long-term strategic objectives.

Design Excellence

Research - Competitor Study

Some of our competitors are Revel, Square POS, Toast and Lightspeed. While these competitors bring specific strengths to the table whether it's UI polish, e-commerce, or ease of setup Aloha Cloud differentiates itself by offering enterprise-grade reliability, robust multi-location management, deep operational insights, and purpose-built hardware for restaurant environments. It’s a platform designed not just to sell food, but to run the entire restaurant business without any hassle.

System Design & Consistency

Collaborated with fellow designers to build a comprehensive design system and component library tailored specifically for our restaurant ecosystem products. This involved conducting UI audits, establishing visual guidelines (typography, color, spacing, iconography), and defining reusable components to ensure consistency across POS terminals, mobile interfaces, and back-office tools. We worked closely with engineers to maintain design-to-development parity, supported accessibility standards, and documented usage patterns to guide scalable design decisions.

The system was continuously iterated based on evolving product needs, feedback from internal teams, and real-world usage insights, ultimately streamlining collaboration, reducing design debt, and delivering a cohesive user experience across the platform.

Prototypes and Validation

To ensure a high-impact and user-centered design, I began with comprehensive industry research analyzing best practices and studying competitor platforms to understand what works, what doesn’t, and where we could differentiate. This research directly informed the creation of detailed user flows, helping to align the product vision with real-world needs before any design work began.

I designed and tested high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, simulating critical workflows across both quick service and table service models including order management, multi-mode ordering, and loyalty features. These interactive prototypes were instrumental in validating user interactions, edge cases, and system feedback prior to development.

Throughout the process, I continued to explore low-fidelity wireframes and interactive sketches to identify design gaps, validate micro-interactions, and facilitate early feedback from cross-functional teams. This iterative approach ensured we weren’t just building for what the business needed but for what the end users intuitively expected.

In collaboration with developers and product managers, I also ensured that design specifications were production-ready, accessible, and aligned with the broader design system. Design critiques, usability sessions, and data-informed refinements helped us continuously raise the bar on product quality and create a seamless, intuitive, and scalable experience for all user roles from servers to managers.

To ensure a high-impact and user-centered design, I began with comprehensive industry research analyzing best practices and studying competitor platforms to understand what works, what doesn’t, and where we could differentiate. This research directly informed the creation of detailed user flows, helping to align the product vision with real-world needs before any design work began.

I designed and tested high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, simulating critical workflows across both quick service and table service models, including order management, multi-mode ordering, and loyalty features. These interactive prototypes were instrumental in validating user interactions, edge cases, and system feedback prior to development.

Throughout the process, I continued to explore low-fidelity wireframes and interactive sketches to identify design gaps, validate micro-interactions, and gather early feedback from cross-functional teams. This iterative approach ensured that we weren’t just building for what the business needed, but also for what the end users intuitively expected.

In collaboration with developers and product managers, I also ensured that design specifications were production-ready, accessible, and aligned with the broader design system. Design critiques, usability sessions, and data-informed refinements helped us continuously raise the bar on product quality and create a seamless, intuitive, and scalable experience for all user roles, from servers to managers.

Developed simultaneous loyalty flows for Point-of-Sale and Customer-Facing Displays, enabling real-time, synchronized interactions across platforms.

Ideal Flow: