Kitchen Display Screen Revamp
The Kitchen Display Screen (KDS) is the chef-facing controller inside Foodhub's order ecosystem. I helped shape a phase-by-phase enhancement plan focused on speed under pressure, clarity at a glance and accessibility for busy kitchens — grounded in user feedback and validated against peak-hour traffic.
During peak service, chefs struggled to track high-volume orders, prioritise items and spot what was ready — leading to delays and errors.
A phased revamp: prioritised colour-coded orders with timers and alerts, per-item ready toggles, search across orders, analytics, accessibility and offline mode — each phase validated before the next.
A faster, glanceable kitchen workspace validated against peak-hour load and shaped by recurring user-feedback sessions.
Feature definition, validation & release readiness
Chefs & kitchen staff in high-volume takeaway kitchens
A faster, glanceable kitchen workspace validated against peak-hour load
Context
The KDS sits at the heart of Foodhub's order ecosystem — the screen chefs watch through an entire service. It receives live orders, drives prep, and feeds readiness signals downstream to dispatch. Anything that slows a chef down here ripples straight into late deliveries and unhappy customers.
Problem / Opportunity
At peak times the screen became a wall of orders. Chefs lost time scanning for what mattered, couldn't easily tell what was ready, and had no resilient behaviour when connectivity dropped — exactly when a kitchen can least afford to stop.
User & Business Need
- Chefs needed to prioritise and act at a glance, hands busy, under time pressure
- Restaurants needed fewer errors and faster turnaround during rushes
- The business needed the KDS to stay dependable across thousands of varied kitchens and connectivity conditions
My Role
- Analysed chef workflows and recurring user feedback to frame the real problems
- Shaped requirements and acceptance criteria for each enhancement phase
- Validated feature logic and edge cases before and during release
- Worked across product, engineering and QA to keep scope realistic and release-ready
Product & Delivery Approach
Rather than a single big redesign, the work was sequenced into validated phases so each improvement could prove itself in real kitchens.
- Order management: colour-coded status (Cooking / Ready to serve), per-item ready toggles, cooking timers and priority alerts
- Customisation: adjustable layout and colour codes, restaurant focus modes, light/dark and brightness, PIN-protected supervisor actions
- Search & alerts: search an item across all live orders; auto-signal dispatch when ready; gentle reminder shake every 15s once an order is ready
- Insight & safety: kitchen analytics (avg prep time, peak hours, top items), a digital recipe library, in-context customer feedback and clear allergen indicators
- Accessibility & resilience: readable fonts, large touch targets, multi-language support and a functional offline mode
Constraints & Trade-offs
- Every pixel competes for a chef's attention — new signals had to add clarity, not noise
- Offline behaviour meant carefully deciding what must keep working versus what can safely wait to sync
- Features had to degrade gracefully across a huge range of devices, screen sizes and kitchen setups
- Sequencing mattered: high-impact, low-risk changes were prioritised so value shipped early
Outcome & Impact
- A glanceable workspace where priority and readiness are obvious at a glance
- Clearer operational visibility from kitchen to dispatch
- Stronger release confidence through phase-by-phase validation against peak load
- Improvements grounded in — and continuously refined by — real chef feedback
Key Learnings
- In an operational tool, attention is the scarcest resource — clarity beats feature count.
- Phasing a revamp lets each change earn its place and de-risks the release.
- Designing for offline first forces honest decisions about what the product truly must guarantee.