I spent two years building one of these systems (http://rez.urbanspoon.com). It runs on the iPad and I'm pretty confident it's the market leader in terms of usability.
A lot of the responses in here make it out like this is about stupid arrogant programmers who didn't bother to understand anyone's needs. That's not true; what's really going on is that the design challenges are significant -- think high end calendaring plus inventory management, but used one handed for 5 seconds at a time. And design is not how restaurants get sold anyway -- they get sold on the marketing and table optimization stuff, which Live Bookings is actually pretty good at.
A good counterexample to look at are the back of house systems restaurants use. That's the touch screen they plug your order in to. Next time you're out to eat, notice the high information density and the fact that your server can key the entire order for your party of six in like 3 seconds. The fact that they all look like ass is not really relevant -- a lot of those setups are very well designed.
A lot of the responses in here make it out like this is about stupid arrogant programmers who didn't bother to understand anyone's needs. That's not true; what's really going on is that the design challenges are significant -- think high end calendaring plus inventory management, but used one handed for 5 seconds at a time. And design is not how restaurants get sold anyway -- they get sold on the marketing and table optimization stuff, which Live Bookings is actually pretty good at.
A good counterexample to look at are the back of house systems restaurants use. That's the touch screen they plug your order in to. Next time you're out to eat, notice the high information density and the fact that your server can key the entire order for your party of six in like 3 seconds. The fact that they all look like ass is not really relevant -- a lot of those setups are very well designed.