Keep the
good stuff
moving.
Know what you have, what you need and what needs your attention before the next service starts.
Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.
READY
✳
Clear signals.
Better service.
Select an inventory state to preview how the restaurant team's day changes. All values here are illustrative.
Stockroom / Restaurant operations
A kitchen inventory and purchasing workspace that flags waste risk and prepares a transparent reorder draft.
The problem
Small restaurants make purchasing decisions from disconnected spreadsheets and staff memory, leading to overordering, stockouts and last-minute scrambles.
Product strategy
Loud but functional inventory cards use recognizable categories and glanceable quantity indicators. An order-review screen shows explicit calculations.
Proposed technical architecture
Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, inventory events, purchase-order queue and optional supplier APIs. Fictional product counts and prices. This architecture is a proposal, not a deployed backend.
Design decisions
Playful utility / off-white, forest and persimmon. Show thresholds, existing stock, rationale and editable quantities in one review step.
UX research approach
Synthetic research: 7 fictional kitchen-manager interviews, 10 modeled reorder tasks. This is a fictional scenario: no real interviews or measured outcomes are claimed.
Accessibility & responsive design
Keyboard-operable controls, visible focus, readable content and responsive reflow support this concept. Reduced-motion preferences remove animated scrolling. Physical-device and assistive-technology validation remain future work.
AI-assisted workflow
Design around pre-service time constraints, irregular inventory units, expired inventory and undoable changes. AI-assisted implementation is used for prototyping and iteration; product recommendations here are deterministic local simulations.
Limitations & lessons
Unknown stock units are flagged for manual count. The simulation never places a supplier order or charges money. The next step is real user research, production data validation and accessibility testing before any launch.
Information architecture & user flow
- Demo inventory is compared with thresholds
- Agent proposes quantities and flags possible waste
- Kitchen manager checks the recommendation
- Draft order remains unsubmitted until confirmed
Core views: Today’s inventory radar → Reorder recommendation builder → Supplier order review