Designing for Real-Time Team Coordination in Restaurants

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"Funsize was instrumental in guiding us through user testing  that led to a much higher adoption rate. By helping us streamline user flows and address key pain points, they not only elevated the quality of our product's design but also empowered our team with a deeper understanding of the UX process.”

- Hayden Smith, UX Researcher, Dataspoon

Overview

DataSpoon is a restaurant management platform designed to help kitchens operate more efficiently across inventory, prep, and staffing. I worked on expanding the product into scheduling — a critical gap we identified during on-site research. Restaurants were managing staff schedules manually, often across multiple disconnected tools, leading to confusion, missed shifts, and constant last-minute coordination. My role focused on defining the scheduling experience from 0→1 — translating real-world operational chaos into a clear, flexible system that could support fast-paced, multilingual kitchen environments.

My Role

Helped drive experience strategy and product direction from early discovery through delivery, shaping how the product would approach the core coordination problem
Defined information architecture and system modeling for a platform spanning multiple roles, shift types, and real-time states.
Designed interaction patterns and high-fidelity prototypes that made a complex, data-heavy system feel fast and legible.
Conducted on-site research inside working restaurant environments and moderated user testing
Collaborated closely with a design director, product, and engineering — presenting reasoning at each stage to keep the team aligned.

How might we create a scheduling system that is flexible, legible, and actionable in a high-pressure environment — without disrupting workflows that are already in motion?

The Problem

The core issue wasn’t just the absence of a digital schedule. Scheduling itself was inherently dynamic — shifts changed constantly, availability was fluid, and updates happened in real time. The result was a system that was inefficient and prone to mistakes. The environment added another layer of complexity. Many staff members were Spanish-speaking only, time for training was minimal, and technical proficiency varied widely. Any solution needed to be immediately legible, flexible enough to accommodate constant change, and resilient in a fast-moving, real-world setting. My task was to create a shared system that made the schedule instantly clear — so everyone, regardless of role or language, could understand where they needed to be, when, and how the team was operating together.

Key Constraints

• Fast-paced kitchen environment with limited time for training • Multilingual staff (Spanish-first for many users) • Frequent schedule changes and last-minute adjustments • Multiple roles and overlapping shifts • Varying levels of technical proficiency

Approach

Rather than treating scheduling as a static calendar, I approached it as a system designed first and foremost for the people actually working the shifts. In practice, kitchen staff needed to quickly understand where they needed to be, when, and who they were working with, often at a glance, in a fast-moving environment with little time for interpretation. That shifted the focus of the design from managing schedules to making schedules legible and actionable in real time. The system was structured around modular shift blocks that represented role, time, and station assignment. These were organized to make relationships between people and stations immediately visible, so staff could orient themselves quickly without needing to parse dense information or rely on additional communication. Because this experience would be used in high-pressure conditions, clarity became the primary constraint. The interface needed to be scannable in seconds. I used color, layout, and grouping intentionally to establish hierarchy —making it easy to distinguish roles, identify where someone needed to be, and understand how the team was distributed across the kitchen. These decisions were tested across both light and dark modes to ensure visibility in bright, screen-heavy environments. While manager functionality was supported, it was intentionally secondary. The primary goal was to reduce ambiguity for staff on the floor, ensuring that at any moment they could answer: Where do I need to be right now? Who am I working with? What changed since I last checked? By prioritizing clarity for the people executing the work, the schedule became a shared, reliable reference point rather than a static plan.

Outcome

The resulting system provided a clear, centralized view of the schedule that reduced confusion on the floor and minimized the need for constant verbal coordination. Staff were able to orient themselves quickly, even as changes occurred, while managers benefited from a more consistent and maintainable structure behind the scenes. By designing for real-time consumption first, the system created a stronger foundation for both execution and future operational tooling.