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Chefpost Portal
A solution for chefs to manage their products and schedules easily.
Background
Setting the table
Role
As the Lead UX Researcher and Designer, I focused on clarifying the core user problems through research, creating detailed personas, and designing a user-friendly portal to address their needs.
Client
Chefpost
Duration
2 week
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Notion
What's Chefpost?
A service that provides skilled chefs to turn meal preparation into enjoyable moments. Chefs bring their expertise to your kitchen, letting you explore cuisines and host guests without the stress of cooking.
Challenge
The management portal for chefs' product and schedule management is causing frustration, as most users struggle to complete tasks. Our client aimed to improve the experience to help chefs manage their time efficiently and focus on creating culinary delights.
Problem Statement
An insightful agenda on a dashboard that provides easier access for the chef to adjust the schedule is crucial because they want to manage their time wisely to provide customers with a well-prepared service.
Research
Gathering the Ingrideints
Persona
I helped the team focus on the most critical issues in the user flow by creating a problem statement and persona based on heuristic evaluation, comparative research, and direct interviews with chefs. These helped clarify our users’ needs and surfaced key challenges to solve.
Caesar S. Alad - The GO-Getter Chef
GOALS
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Efficiently manage his schedule and bookings.
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Improve his culinary skills and client. experience.
NEEDS
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Needs an interactive dashboard to help him quickly access menu options.
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Adjust his time and availability effortlessly.
Age: 38
Occupation: Chef
Location: Miami, FL
Scenario
He is booked with multiple sessions and he wants to make sure he has enough time to prepare for his client, so he can serve his customers well-prepared delicious meals.
Heuristic Evaluation
To identify initial usability issues and validate the client’s concerns about a confusing experience, I ran a heuristic evaluation and identified the dashboard, add/remove hours, and calendar screens as the main problem areas. These screens were cluttered with too much information and lacked clear instructions, making it hard, especially for non-tech-savvy users, to complete tasks. This revealed the need to simplify the layout and improve guidance.
Dashboard
Cannot tell what page
Not instruction
Not interactive
Information doesn't tell anything.
Edit Hours
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Too many inputs
No instructions and confusing label
Edit is not flexible
Calendar
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Unutilized white space
Information is too cluttered
Irrelevant hours
Comparative Research
After learning from the evaluation, I wanted to understand how other platforms solve similar challenges. I analyzed Lyft, Instacart, and other task-based apps. A consistent pattern emerged: users rely on a well-organized dashboard to access key information. This insight shaped the foundation of Chefpost’s redesign by highlighting the need for a simplified, dashboard-first experience that prioritizes clarity and efficient task completion.
User Interviews
To understand what tools chefs rely on to manage their cooking business, I interviewed several chefs to uncover their motivations, pain points, and common behaviors. These conversations revealed three key user needs that directly influenced the redesign:
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Visibility of earnings boosts motivation
Chefs feel more valued and engaged when they can easily track how much they’re making.
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Quick access to essential information is critical
Many chefs use Chefpost alongside other jobs or responsibilities, leaving them mentally exhausted. They need to navigate the app quickly without unnecessary friction.
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Schedules must surface only the most relevant details
A clean, glanceable schedule helps chefs stay organized and reduces cognitive load.
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Flexibility to Manage Schedule
A clean, glanceable schedule helps chefs stay organized and reduces cognitive load.
Key Findings
Booking / Services
The portal helps users manage their schedules
Schedule
Serves as a tool to manage bookings and services.
Business QC
The portal provides the ability to check the quality of businesses.
Define
Selecting the best ingridient
From Research to Insights
My goal was to analyze the research data to identify and prioritize the most critical features for improvement. This analysis led to three key insights:
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Effortless Management: Chefs require quick, effortless access to their earnings and schedules.
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Cluttered Dashboard: The dashboard serves as the central touchpoint, but is currently cluttered, hindering usability.
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Effective Flow: Similar applications employ streamlined, step-by-step flows that effectively guide users through tasks.
Design Principles Based on Findings
Accessibility
Adjusting button sizes and text styles to meet WCAG standards, ensuring clearer, more accessible interactions for the persona.
Consistency
Utilizing the Chefpost style guide will help support a stress-free experience for busy chefs.
Readability
Restructuring the hierarchy to surface frequently used features and logically group content, reducing cognitive load and improving task efficiency.
System Feedback
Adding confirmation states for key actions to provide clear feedback will reduce user uncertainty, as the original design did not.
Primary Persona?
Caesar S. Alad - The GO-Getter Chef
Problem Statement
Caesar needs an insightful agenda on his dashboard that provides easier access to adjust his schedule because he wants to manage his time wisely to provide customers with a well prepared services.
Why Caesar?
Caesar's problem occurs more often and greatly impacts usability, his need for the dashboard to manage schedules naturally becomes more critical to improve for all users.
Ideation
Preparing the ingridients
User Flow
To better understand how chefs should navigate the platform to complete key management tasks, I created a user flow that mapped out the ideal journey. This helped identify the necessary screens and interactions to redesign, ensuring both the client and the team had a shared understanding of the improved, more efficient experience compared to the previous version.
Sketch
To quickly explore ideas and gather early client feedback, we created low-fidelity sketches for the key screens. I focused on validating layout clarity and feature prioritization to ensure the design aligned with both user needs and business goals. This collaborative sketching phase helped us catch issues early, align with the team, and reduce rework before moving into high-fidelity design.
Mockup
Serving the meal
Design Solution
To help chefs complete tasks more efficiently, I focused on creating a dashboard that surfaces key actions and information upfront. Drawing inspiration from apps like Lyft and financial tools and from usability test feedbacks, I designed a layout that aligned with chefs’ mental models, prioritizing visibility of earnings, schedules, and job management. These decisions balanced the needs of both chefs and clients by streamlining task flows from a single, accessible entry point.
Dashboard
To improve access to key information, I redesigned the dashboard to highlight upcoming bookings, schedule management, revenue, and other frequently used features.
Manage Schedule - Adjust Hours
I designed a flexible scheduling tool that lets users adjust hours across multiple days and weeks.
Manage Schedule - Set Schedule
I simplified the input fields and added confirmation states to make setting schedule ranges more intuitive.
Calendar
I cleaned up the calendar UI and added in-line booking details, allowing users to quickly scan and understand their schedule at a glance.
Testing Design
Cooking and tasting the dish
Usability Testing
To uncover misunderstandings and unexpected behaviors, I conducted usability testing focused on how users interact with the dashboard and edit their schedules, one of the top-priority issues. The test revealed several problems and features we had not discovered earlier. These findings helped guide design improvements before the final handoff.
Session Approval
Users often forget to report the start of their booked sessions, highlighting the need for a clearer and more accessible way to submit session start times.
Booking Details
Users wanted a quicker way to view details for their upcoming bookings without having to navigate through multiple screens.
Dashboard
Legends
Users struggled with the page layout due to poor label hierarchy and unclear color coding on the calendar, making it difficult to interpret key information.
Calendar
Removal
Users expected a simpler way to mark an entire day off, but found the current process unintuitive and time-consuming.
Adjust Hours
Styleguide
I aimed to maintain the beauty and simplicity of the current style on Chefpost, so I reused the relaxing and calm color palette.
Matched additional colors to the original style.
Accessibility
To better support our user persona, I updated button sizes and text styles to meet WCAG accessibility standards. This ensured more intuitive, readable, and accessible interactions throughout the app.
Clear contrast
Min button height 44px
Usability Test
Through usability testing and client feedback, I identified opportunities to clarify button labeling and simplify hour management controls. These adjustments reduced confusion and improved task efficiency, especially for less tech-savvy users.
Simplify the options
Changed the wording to engaging tone
Reflect
Reviewing our menu
Results
Faster Task Completion
Enabled users to access their upcoming schedules with all necessary details, reducing booking management time by 30%.
Error Reduction
Previously, users were unable to change their schedules and had to contact the Admin for any updates. By improving the process, we reduced errors by 80%.
Takeaways
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Client Collaboration: Maintaining frequent communication with our dynamic client was essential to align business objectives with user needs effectively.
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Designing for Internal Users: Developing in-house products highlighted the importance of empathizing not only with our clients but also with internal teams who ensure smooth business operations.
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User-Centered Design for Diverse Audiences: This project reinforced the importance of creating intuitive interfaces tailored for non-tech-savvy users with demanding schedules. By simplifying workflows and reducing cognitive load, we enhanced usability for this demographic.
Next Step
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Focus on Secondary Persona (Maple): Continue developing features that support Maple’s goals, including a cohesive product page to help her grow her culinary business
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Deeper Collaboration: I’d like to work more closely with the client on backend tools to create better support systems and smoother experiences for both users and internal teams.