Configuration of the SELLmatix POS Screens is worth a fair amount of thought because these screens normally are the main user interface that operators will deal with. There is an almost infinite number of different ways that SELLmatix Screens can be set up. You could have as many as 10,000 different Screens in a SELLmatix POS Configuration with an infinite variety of navigation paths, graphics and colours.

In other words, you can configure the screens in any way you wish, and with that power comes the ability to create configurations that are efficient, user friendly, fast to use, easy to navigate and with a pleasing appearance. But that power also means that you can create configurations that are inefficient, hard to understand and use that look hideous.

It is worth putting in a little time to refine the screen layout because once created for one terminal, it is easy to copy the screen configuration to other terminals. The documentation on Configuring Point of Sale covers Display Configuration details.

The following guidelines are designed to help you configure your screens to be efficient, fast to use, easy to navigate and pleasing to the eye.

Number of Buttons on a Screen
You can configure screens to have a lot of touch buttons on each screen, or relatively few. The secret of effective Touch Screen configurations is to have relatively large buttons. Fingers touching a touch screen are less precise than a mouse cursor, and normal dialog buttons such as "OK" or "Cancel" are very difficult to use accurately on a touch screen.

The larger the button the more text you can easily display on the surface of each button. One big advantage of touch buttons over keyboard overlays on a keyboard is that the descriptions for each button can be more concise. If you make the button too small you lose this advantage. In most cases 8 buttons across and 8 down is a good combination, but you can decide what you want.

It is a good practice for all the screens to have the same number of buttons. Most of the sample configurations have more buttons on the Input Screen than others to allow for an on screen keyboard, but if the number changes with every screen this can be disconcerting for the operator making them need to "hunt" for the button they are looking for.

Common Buttons
Certain buttons will be used frequently. It is a good idea to have those buttons in the same place on every screen and for those common buttons to have the same appearance. Consistency means that once users become familiar with the display they automatically know where to touch or click and this greatly increases speed of operation.

One Touch Product Buttons
If you have 3000 products, let alone 100,000, creating a one key button for each product would involve an enormous amount of work, and the system would be almost impossible to use because of the difficulty in finding the right button.

As a general rule, if an item has a barcode on the packaging, you should barcode scan the item, not set up a touch button. There might be some rare exceptions where there are products that are sold frequently where the barcode is printed on poor quality material that makes it difficult to scan. Newspapers are sometimes an example depending on the quality of the newsprint, and in such cases you might set up a One Touch Button for such items.

Number of Screens
While you can have as many screens as you want, the biggest issue will making it easy for operators to navigate around the screens easily. It is good practice to:-

• Have the Start Screen (Screen0) as a navigation screen that leads to other screens.
• To have a single button on the same place of every screen that returns to the start screen.
• To group like products on a single screen. If there are more products in that group than will fit on a single screen, then have the first screen from the start screen have the most common products, and another button that leads to "More..."
• Where there is a heirarchy of products, you may want to set things up so that you can "Drill Down" in greater detail to find the right item. For example the main screen might have a "Fruit & Veg" button leading to a Fruit & Veg Screen, where the users chooses "Apples..." which in turn leads to another screen that has buttons for "Granny Smith", "Jonathon", "Delicious" and other varieties of apple. Each of theses screens however should have a single button to navigate back to the main screen. If the next item the clerk processes is a type of Cheese, you do not want the operator to have to key a "Back" button 5 times on 5 different screens before they get back to the main screen and start finding the right type of cheese.
• In a restaurant, it is a good idea to use a separate screen on the POS for each page of the Menu from which customers order.
• If there are common modifiers, extras or leave off items it is a good idea to have screens containing these items which can be called up from any screen with a single button.
• Try to color code the screens so that the navigation button on the main screen has the same background color as the buttons on the screen that follows. This color pattern provides a visual cue to the operator so they know at a glance which screen they are on.

If you haven't already done so, why not activate SELLmatix now and start enjoying the benefits of the system now. With SELLmatix, you don't have to pay for everything up front. You can implement the system in stages adding parts as you go from the savings you make. As little as $30 gets you started. No risk. No long term commitment. Activate Now!

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