Bianca, a restaurant management dashboard
48 managers and 572 employees reported the exact same problem. No one had solved it.
Two weeks. Two sides of the same system.
To understand why running a restaurant feels so chaotic, I ran a research sprint: I surveyed managers and employees separately, then cross-referenced their frustrations. The scale of the problem came through immediately.
The information was already there. What the research found was cognitive load: in existing interfaces, urgent and trivial blend together.
The same pain, experienced from opposite directions
- Hard to see who's working when
- High employee turnover creates constant last-minute changes (sickness, sudden unavailability, people quitting, exams), and each one demands immediate clarity that isn't there
- No overall picture of the week, because everything runs in duplicate, split between a shared WhatsApp group and separate personal messages
- Unclear when I'm working
- Changes arrive last-minute
- No overall picture of the week
A dashboard built for decisions, not just data display
I chose a central dashboard over separate reports because the research showed managers need to decide fast in the morning rather than analyze deeply. The dashboard is built around action: what needs attention right now.
Separating critical from important. To reduce the cognitive load the research identified, I clearly separated Critical Alerts, shown first at the top, from Important and Informational Alerts shown below. Urgent things look urgent, and routine things don't compete with them.
Menu, inventory and ordering in one place
Previously, managers had to jump between three disconnected sections to manage the daily flow of ingredients and supplies. I unified Menu management, Inventory, and Purchases into a single operational category, so a manager can move from "what do we have" to "what do we need to order" in one place, without context-switching.
Built for high turnover
High employee turnover is one of the most consistent pain points managers reported. I built a dedicated Staff section with full transparency: who's active, who isn't, and how to quickly find and edit any record. An add-employee flow keeps onboarding fast even when someone joins mid-week.
Scheduling was the other half of the shared problem. Both managers and employees reported not having a clear picture of the week. The weekly shift board shows the manager the whole week at a glance, and shows the employee exactly when they're working, instead of leaving that information scattered between a WhatsApp group and personal messages. If a shift is understaffed, the system flags it in red, so the manager doesn't discover the problem at the last minute. If an employee ends a shift early, the system automatically bumps them to the top of the list, in gray, with their available hours marked, so re-staffing happens immediately, without manually searching for who's free.
A manager opens Bianca in the morning and sees exactly what to do next.
The urgency levels are separated, operations sit in one category, and the whole week is on a single board. That turns a noisy dashboard into one a manager can act on without switching tabs or hunting through menus to find out who's free.
