Role

Led UX transformation for a Fortune 500 QSR's kitchen operations, revolutionizing efficiency and team member experience through human-centered design. Through extensive field research and stakeholder collaboration, delivered innovative solutions that increased production speed by 30% while reducing training time by 50%, creating accessible interfaces for 250,000+ team members across 2,500 locations. Key innovations included gamified training modules, real-time performance analytics, and an intuitive breading station interface that reduced errors by 40% and improved quality consistency scores by 25%. Orchestrated workshops with 13 cross-functional leaders to develop data-driven personas and user journeys, resulting in a unified product vision that aligned technology capabilities with frontline operational needs.

Breading station software audit

I went on several site visits to witness the product in use and conduct user interviews. Conducted stakeholder and staff member interviews for history and context of the product. Surveyed 100 team members and team leads.

Short term solutions
The short term solutions focused on flexibility of operation controls for kitchen leads, desirable information, and an accessible and friendly user interface while utilizing the company’s young design system and contributing to the design system.

Information architecture suggestions
- Add pan column displaying total pans being used whether in queue or hot holding
- Incorporate Food Safety instructions. The breader is working with fresh raw chicken. Better safe than sorry.
- Incorporate a footer with a refresh button. It will provide how recent of information the breader is looking at and give an indication if the screen has froze.
- Provide a made to order scenario. Often times when the restaurant is at the end of a daypart (breakfast or dinner) made to order makes the most sense versus continuing with batch estimates.
- Provide flexibility in the settings. Restaurants tend to have different needs when it comes to number of pans in rotation, how much to bread, and which proteins need more attention than others.
- I suggest changing the words "Actual Performance" with "Real-Time Hot Holding".

User interface suggestions
- The size of the text and use of fonts need a little refining. Some were way too small based on my kicthen visits and there needed to be more consistency and space between elements to allow easy viewing.
- The protein colors and stop light colors are competing with each other and are causing clutter. I recommend using shades of the protein color in the timer bar and emphasizing the target with the boldest tone.
- For accessibility, I would focus on color tones for the timer bar. Red and green are common colors people can not see but they can see light versus dark tones.
- I would take the small type out and provide icons on the edge of the timer bar.

Assumptions workshop

I curated and led an assumptions workshop with 13 leaders in the company who have conducted their own user interviews and participated in site visits. The creation of this workshop was based on the various responses I received during staff interviews. It was clear quite a few people had strong assumptions and ideas but have yet to come together to discuss. As a result of this workshop, we came together as a team and created 3 likely personas, problem statements, opportunity statements, solutions, worst ideas, and journeys.

Reimagining breading station software

Following the assumption workshop, I worked with the software engineers and technology leads to think about the future. What technology can we bring into the kitchen to make the team member's tasks easier, less stressful, and more efficient. How do we design for restaurants so they can customize all this technology to their specific needs? We focused in on modular designs that split the screen with the use of widgets (bite size detail) and full screen takeovers as well as exploring if a template can be reusable in other parts of the kitchen. Part of this transformation involved utilizing a much bigger Android touch screen vs the iPad.

Gamification + Badge System

Explored a new concept in the kitchen: a badge system and gamification. Led the badge system definitions and design with tapping into the persona assumptions and focusing on a human-centered approach while also surveying over 20 restaurant operators and leads. With over 50 badge ideas, we divided them into three groups: milestones, competition (real-time), and performance (competition result). As a new concept, our young design system didn't have components that we could use, so we surveyed 4 design options and created a kitchen badge component with different properties.