The flip side is techies often assume that because something is newer, more complicated, and more "high-tech" it's automatically better. In reality they often introduce dozens of new failure modes (what's the worst that can happen with a whiteboard, out of ink?) for a 10% productivity gain on the rare occasions it works as intended.
I've sat through dozens of sales pitches for (shiny new product that will replace your old piece of junk). When pressed on why it's better, the answer is basically "Technology!"
I was at a meeting years ago (IBM..they did have a lot of meetings). This was about making a complex online tool for facilities engineering.
After some discussion, the boss determined "This is solution in search of a problem" (it really was), so the project wasn't started.
This answer stuck with me. The tech was interesting but looking the bigger picture it didn't help the business. It was the do nothing alternative that made the most sense
One of the things I've realized is that you basically need to design your technology to do exactly what the customer does. Once you've done that, you can start cutting unneccesary stuff out and making stuff easier.
If you want to introduce a step that lets someone skip 2 steps, it's going to be a hard sell. Unless it's a critical part of your product, you should probably make it skippable. Otherwise people are liable to avoid it, falling back onto pen and paper, then run into trouble down the line when it prevents them from doing what they want.
Yeah. Assuming people are doing something just "because it's how they always did it" is a wrong approach. Your new 1-step process may let them skip 2 steps, but it may turn out they depend on the process being 2-step in order to e.g. handle special cases.
This is what I often see happens with software, when someone tries to simplify the workflow by just looking at the most common sequence of actions and designing around that, and not minding all the flexibility they're throwing away that's crucial to handling uncommon cases. It's (one of) the reason people keep going back to Excel spreadsheets, even though your custom-tailored piece of software does everything they need better. It's because your system is rigid, and Excel spreadsheets are flexible.
I think the problem is a lack of dogfooding in the industry. There is plenty of SaaS providers that simply sell the software to their users but don't use it themselves.
The ideal SaaS is one that sells software they use themselves.
I would think for a PoS it would be similar. Selling a good PoS might require running a few restaurants where you deploy and test it. That way you aren't running risk of not knowing the pain points because the users are far away and don't want to bother you with it. It should also lead to some pragmatism instead of overthinking.
Companies are using many user research techniques to get into heads of their users and find out their needs and painpoints. One of those is shadowing users over some period of time, where as a user researcher you basically spend every day observing your users perform their usual activities in their environment.
The problem of many today's companies is not using this approach right - or even worse - not considering this as a part of their business strategy, and that's when their solutions fail.
I've sat through dozens of sales pitches for (shiny new product that will replace your old piece of junk). When pressed on why it's better, the answer is basically "Technology!"