DISCOVER PROJECT
Panago Pizza
Order System
One order. Three users. A system built to handle all of it.
2026 - Ongoing
— Orders don't wait. The system behind the counter has to keep up with the rush, the customisations, and the person on the other end of the phone - all at once.
Scope
UX Strategy · Information Architecture · User Flow · AI UI Design
Project Overview
Every order starts the same way. What happens next depends entirely on who's placing it.
The Order System is the design backbone of everything order-related in the Panago POS - a multi-user platform serving store staff, CCC agents, and customers, each with their own context, constraints, and expectations.
The scope spans the full ordering journey: browsing the menu, building pizzas (Recipe, Create Your Own, and Dual Recipe half-and-half builds), assembling multi-slot deals, handling allergies and stocked-out ingredients, applying discounts and loyalty rewards, and taking payment - all without a single full page reload mid-order. What makes this project genuinely complex isn't any one flow. It's the fact that three completely different users have to move through the same underlying system - at different speeds, with different trust levels, for different reasons - and every one of them needs it to feel made for them.
Approach
The hardest design constraint wasn't the screen. It was the counter.
The POS runs on a 1366×768 touchscreen - a tight canvas with no room for fat navigation, redundant confirmation dialogs, or flows that require staff to look away from the customer. Every design decision was filtered through one question: Does this hold up at lunch rush?
The architecture is built around a persistent three-panel layout. The left rail handles category navigation. The centre holds the product grid or customiser. The right panel is the live cart - always visible, always current. No screen changes. No lost context. The payment screen is the only full-screen takeover, and it earns that interruption. Customer lookup runs in parallel with order building, never as a gate. A staff member can start adding items before a customer is even identified, and the system retroactively scans the cart for allergy conflicts the moment a profile is attached. The design philosophy throughout: reduce friction at every step, surface the right information at the right moment, and never punish staff for moving fast.
Process
The project is now at v5.6, built iteratively across six major versions, each one adding a layer of real-world complexity on top of a stable foundation.
Good systems don't appear fully formed - they get argued into existence, one edge case at a time. The foundation was deceptively simple: three panels, always visible, no full-page navigation mid-order. But the real work started when the pizza did. Three distinct pizza modes, each with its own validation logic, topping volume controls, placement rules, and entry points. A soft-first customer identification pattern that never gates an order. A Smart Match system that quietly detects when a CYO build is an exact recipe match and offers the switch - no interruption, pure customer service baked into the flow. Then came the long tail. A Deal Builder that handles any number of slots across three slot types, a non-linear fill order, and a progress rail that never makes you start over. An 86'd system that surfaces stockouts before the customiser even opens - with override paths, substitution notes, and a priority stack that always puts allergy warnings first. Six versions in, the system is still growing. That dashed node at the end of the version timeline isn't a mistake. It's just honest.
Product Images
