E-Café: An Innovation for Providing Safe Services in a Dine-in Restaurant during the New and the Next Normal

บทคัดย่อ

          Due to the spread out of COVID-19, the global restaurant industry was highly impacted. The number of sit-in customers dropped out to zero in many countries. To fulfill the requirements of restaurant operators in operating the dine-in services during the spread out of COVID-19 and to restore the customers’ confidence in dine-in services provided by the restaurant operators, the objectives of this research and development are 1) to develop a responsive web-based application used for supporting the services in the dine-in restaurant and 2) to evaluate the opinions and satisfaction of both restaurant operators and customers toward the system prototype. The system development tools are Visual Studio Code, PHP, HTML, and Bootstrap Framework. The development life cycle of the system prototype was divided into 4 phases, which are 1) system requirements specification 2) system design 3) system implementation and 4) system prototype evaluation. The implemented system prototype consists of 7 functions, which are 1) To Manage User Account 2) To Manage Menu 3) To Manage Food Order’s Status 4) To Browse Menu 5) To Order Food 6) To Track Food Order’s Status and 7) To Calculate the Food Cost and Service Fee. In the final phase of system development, the system prototype was evaluated by the dine-in service stakeholders. The 2 restaurant managers and 8 waitpersons from the supportive restaurant were invited to participate the group interview. The interview results indicated that the proposed system prototype enabled the restaurant operators in providing dine-in services safely and effectively. The system prototype helped waitpersons and customers to avoid unnecessary contact.  Moreover, 32 customers were invited to evaluate the system through an e-questionnaire by giving satisfaction scores in 3 aspects (i.e., the appropriateness of user interface, the system efficiency and effectiveness, and the overall satisfaction of self-preventive practices by using the system prototype). The customers’ total satisfaction score towards the system prototype is 4.45 (S.D. = 0.59), which means very satisfied. The evaluation results, overall, showed that the proposed system prototype successfully supported the operations relate to dine-in services. The system prototype, additionally, satisfied the need of social distancing and reducing personal contact.