A setting should show you what the guest will see
Every menu setting is a promise about someone else's screen. A live preview in the guest page's own layout shows the embarrassing pick before a customer does.
Most settings screens describe their effect in words: turn this on and guests will be offered suggested add-ons. The operator turns it on, and then has to trust that whatever appears on a customer's phone is sensible — or go scan their own QR code, order something, and check.
We have been replacing the trust with a picture. Where a setting changes what a guest sees, the settings card now draws it — not an illustration, the actual strip, laid out with the guest page's own styling: the same photo tiles, the same add button, the same prices, on the guest page's white background even though the back office is dark. What you are looking at is what they will look at.
Previews catch what prose cannot
The first preview we shipped earned its keep immediately: the "most ordered" ranking, drawn as guests would see it, proudly offered a kilo bag of espresso beans and a catering tub of bouillon paste — raw stock that was technically sellable and genuinely selling. Described in words, that setting sounded fine. Drawn, it was obviously wrong, and the operator saw it before any customer did.
Every mode explains itself, visibly
The other lesson was cheaper: we had written a one-line explanation for every option and attached them as hover tooltips. Phones do not hover. To the person actually running the venue — on a phone, at one in the morning — the AI option said precisely nothing. The explanations now print under the buttons as ordinary text, because help that only appears for a mouse is help half your users never get.