HotSchedules
Project Overview
Project Length: 2 months
Product: HotSchedules is a scheduling app used by over 5 million hospitality workers to manage their shifts and communicate with fellow staff.
Goal: Improve the user experience by simplifying schedule access, clarifying visual hierarchy + fixing issues with the messaging system.
Role: Product Designer
Beginning Thoughts
When I first stepped into a busy restaurant kitchen, I watched servers and cooks jump into their HotSchedules app to check their upcoming shifts. As a designer interested in finding human-centered solutions, I wanted to see how I could redesign HotSchedules outdated interface into an intuitive tool that could keep up with the fast paced world of restaurants.
The Problem That Started It All
As a college student paying my way through school, I worked the weekend shifts in a busy restaurant to stay afloat. Throughout this experience, I was introduced to the HotSchedules app, an interface that lets my coworkers and I view our upcoming schedules, communicate and trade shifts with each other.
One night after a long shift, I tried to use HotSchedules to message a coworker about trading shifts. Just as I hit send, the app froze and crashed. I had to re-open it several times before the message finally went through, leaving me frustrated and worried that my coworker might not get the update in time. That moment made me realize how fragile the communication experience was on an app that restaurant workers depend on daily.
Digging Deeper
My curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to begin my research. I sent a brief survey to restaurant staff at Hillstone Restaurant group, then sat down for follow up interviews with eight of them. I learned that:
Around 38% struggled to find their future schedules due to too many swipes and no calendar. This led to missing shifts and having difficulty releasing/picking up future shifts.
Around 50% dealt with app crashes and login failures when accessing the messages center, leading to users missing out on important alerts and schedule changes.
Constraints
This project pushed me to navigate limited time and resources, which shaped how I prioritized and approached the design process.
Time: Due to my busy college and work schedule, I had to prioritize certain aspects over others within my design process.
Resources: While I had access to the restaurant staff where I worked, I had to rely on small user groups, which were a less varied sample size for gathering my insights.
Focus
How Might We help restaurant workers more easily view and manage their work schedules in a more intuitive way?
Solution: Let’s simplify how people manage their time on the app.
Defining the MVP
An MVP focuses on what really matters to people, making their experience better by solving their core frustrations.
Rather than chase every idea at once, I focused on core pain points: making schedules instantly visible and notifications reliable. The result was a lean Minimum Viable Product that:
> Introduce a calendar view directly on the home screen to reduce swiping.
> Streamline home layout & navbar by grouping key actions such as viewing notifications and editing shifts.
> Standardize icons so users can act with confidence.
Crafting the User Flow
Before jumping into wireframing, I wanted to create a quick flow chart to provide me with a clear guide of how users will move through the app to get their most important work done. This meant I needed to consider ever step of the users actions with the new calendar component and messaging center.
By laying out each decision point, I was able to spot unnecessary taps or confusing detours before any wireframing. That meant I would hopefully have fewer surprises in testing and a smoother path to the user’s goal.
Wireframing solutions
I created wireframes to establish the core user flows before diving into extensive visual design.
These wireframes helped me identify potential usability issues early on and establish a solid foundation for the interface.
Visual Design
I created a very minimal design system to establish HotSchedules branding re-fresh.
The color and typography choices reflect the calming yet uplifting theme of the app.
Picking Up & Releasing Shifts
Final Designs ✨
Validating the designs
I conducted usability testing sessions with the same 8 primary users to validate whether the new designs would solve their problems.
During the session, I observed how users interacted with the prototype and navigated the new calendar view. I asked them to complete a few key tasks and rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5. The results showed that viewing upcoming shifts felt much easier with the improved layout, and users had a smoother time picking up and releasing shifts.
One month’s worth of shift discovery time dropped from an average of 35 seconds to 6 seconds.
Results & Next Steps
When I first showed the redesigned HotSchedules interface to my test users from Hillstone restaurant group, I watched as a months worth of shifts that once took up to 35 seconds to locate suddenly were discovered in under six seconds.
Stepping back from the data, I’m proud of how this project reinforced the lesson that great design isn’t always about adding more features, it’s about removing every obstacle between a user and their goal. Moving forward, I plan to keep testing and fine-tuning based on real feedback, whether that means tweaking icons, adjusting the settings center, or exploring new ways to display time-off requests.
