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Product Design, UI/UX, Brand Development - California, USA

Dashy Dash

A finance and insights web app for restaurants, enabling them to digitize invoices, benchmark produce prices, and make smarter supplier decisions - focusing on turning complex datasets into actionable insights for non-technical users.
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The Challenge

Restaurants face an uneven playing field: suppliers hold pricing power, and restaurants rarely know if they’re getting fair prices. Our goal was to break supplier opacity by helping restaurants:

  • Track and archive purchase invoices

  • Identify savings opportunities across produce

  • Benchmark prices with nearby restaurants

  • Get smarter with their purchasing decisions

The biggest design challenge: building a data-heavy product that remains simple, intuitive, and fast for busy restaurant owners.

Research & Discovery

  • Stakeholder interviews: Over 15 restaurant owners across California interviewed to identify key pain points - especially around invoicing, overpaying, and lack of transparency.

  • Journey mapping: Documented current-state workflows around ordering and invoice storage.

  • Prototype testing: Low- to high-fidelity prototypes were tested with users, including time-on-task and usability scoring.

  • Quant testing: Post-launch, we tracked feature usage rates, task success, and time-to-value.

  • Qual testing: Observed first-time users completing tasks, collecting friction points and language confusion.

Key insight: Users didn’t want raw analytics - they wanted clarity and contextual insights that tell them what to do.

Design Process & Iterations

Our guiding principle: “Make complexity digestible.”

Phase 1: Invoice Digitization & Analytics

  • Built flows to scan, store, and tag invoices

  • Created invoice filtering, labeling, and search functionality

  • Designed weekly/monthly spending dashboards for high-level visibility

  • Developed trend views for price changes across tracked SKUs

Phase 2: Benchmarking 2.0

This was the turning point.

  • Designed the Benchmarking feature, allowing restaurants to anonymously compare their item-level prices with other users in the same geography.

  • Built data visualizations showing where users overpaid/underpaid on produce.

  • Designed supplier recommendation flows that suggested vendors with better deals.

"It felt like I was finally in control of what I pay my suppliers."

Early adopter

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Impact

  • +40% adoption of Benchmarking feature within first 60 days

  • Avg. cost savings of 12–18% reported by pilot users within 3 months

  • Reduced invoice search time by 70% through tagging and smart filters

  • Positive qualitative feedback from 80% of test users citing “clarity,” “control,” and “fairness”

Key Learnings

  • Designing for decisions, not dashboards: Restaurants didn’t want raw data - they wanted direct insights: "You're overpaying on tomatoes by $0.20/lb - switch suppliers."

  • Data trust matters: Visualizing benchmarks required transparency on how comparisons were made, without exposing other businesses.

  • Balance abstraction with detail: The UI needed to surface just enough to nudge action, without overwhelming users.