Kitchen Display System

Overview

Kitchen display system for restaurant business

Designed to support fast-paced kitchen operations, the KDS focuses on clear order hierarchy, timing, and visual status indicators to improve speed, coordination, and accuracy.

My Responsibility

What I worked on

As part of a cross-functional team, we designed a Kitchen Display System focused on clear order prioritization and effective communication between front-of-house and kitchen staff.

Conducting competitive research, studying real kitchen workflows, and identifying key pain points faced by kitchen staff.
Based on this research, contributing to defining the MVP with core functionality, creating wireframes, and designing a simple, functional UI tailored to the realities of a kitchen environment.

Design Process

Process overview

Empathy

Understand the needs and challenges of business and customers. Research of competitors and data analysis, feedback, information collection.

Define

Clearly articulate the problem statements based on insights gathered from the empathy phase.

Ideate

Working with ideas, design options, brainstorming with the team, using AI tools.

Prototype

Develop prototypes with different ideas using AI tools to visualize and test the proposed solutions. And Work with UI design.

Test

The team and the first clients are testing the design, collecting initial feedback and improving the design.

Research

Understanding kitchen operations

Competitor Analysis

Must Have

Order cards with colors indicators Ability to recall tickets to the undone screen Color coding for dine-in, delivery, and take-out Order History Settings Notifications

Nice to Have

Dark/light mode A louder notification ding Accounting of used products Quick access to a repeat order

Attractive

Station auto-routing Smart kitchen priority (AI / logic) Prep time prediction Auto-order

Target Audience — 2 groups

Kitchen staff

Need to know which one to prepare next, and if there is a way to pool orders together by making fries in batch for instance.

Restaurant managers

They take decisions to change the queue of the orders if necessary and analyze daily sales and inventory.

User Pain Points

1

Need flexibility in moving tickets. Dragging, moving, organization, prioritize or manipulation of the tickets in real time

2

Minimize screen contact (minimum sorting)

3

Ability to recall tickets to the undone screen.

4

Ability to recall tickets to the undone screen.

5

The ability to choose a mode. Light mode vs. dark mode

6

Color coding for dine-in, delivery, and take-out.

7

A louder notification ding and the ability to turn it off.

8

Possibility to correct the order. Ability to leave notes from the kitchen, which will be displayed on the screens

Problem Statements

Problem Statement

Daniel is a/an Cook chef

user nameuser characteristics

who needs To accept new orders, control and clearly see the status, quickly interact with orders on the display

user need

because be responsible for the correct and timely serving of dishes.

insight

Problem Statement

Mary is a/an Cook of the hot shop

user nameuser characteristics

who needs To receive orders on the screen in time, clearly see the comments and the ability to write notes

user need

because you need to correctly and on time make an order and give it to the waiter.

insight

Service Workflow

POS–KDS–Kitchen

This is a simplified example flow — actual kitchens typically run several parallel hot and cold stations.

Expeditor

A single overview screen showing every order in the queue. The expeditor uses it to track overall order status and timing across the whole kitchen.

Hot Station

A station-specific screen (grill, fries, etc.) showing only the tickets relevant to that station, so cooks see just what they need to prepare.

Problem & Solution

Challenge

Understanding kitchen dynamics without direct user access

Kitchen environments are high-pressure, high-speed, and leave no room for ambiguity. The challenge was understanding the real dynamics of kitchen operations without direct user access — relying entirely on deep secondary research and competitive analysis.

Solution

Research translated into functional clarity

Built understanding through rigorous research: studying how professional kitchens operate, what causes coordination breakdowns, and how existing KDS solutions fall short. Translated that into a clear, functional UI focused on order hierarchy, timing, and visual status — designed for the heat of real kitchen conditions.

Developer Handoff

Working closely with the team

Throughout the project, I worked in close collaboration with developers — participating in regular syncs, clarifying design intent, and adapting solutions based on technical constraints. Before presenting decisions to the product owner, the designer and developer would validate solutions together internally, ensuring feasibility and catching edge cases early.