BetterTracker : Your shift on autopilot

An exploration in innovation
Challenged by one of our largest customers to show off, this is how we went to work and how I changed the way I think about product design forever.

Jun 26, 2023

minute read

Design thinking

Product strategy

CLIENT

HotSchedules

SERVICES

Product Stategy

ROLE

Lead designer

Project summary

While working with a customer, and building a universal tool to help manage scheduling and inventory, they challenged the team at HotSchedules to really innovate, push the limits. After a series of conversations with their executive team, and then some active brain storming sessions, we came up with the BetterTracker. This was mostly led by my VP of Product, Ricky Friedlander. If you ever get a chance to meet up with him I highly recommend you do so. He’s one of the most creative, kind, and visionary individuals I’ve ever worked with and had a tremendous impact on how I think about products and design.  

The premise was simple, could we use IOT (a cutting edge technology at the time), machine learning, and big/little data to turn our POS and Display boards into living entities. Offering real-time suggestive content, in an organic manner. At the time Halo was huge, and while we couldn’t build a drone assistant we were totally inspired by Spark.

    BetterTracker not only gives you in-depth real-time awareness of your store, but also gives you the ability to handle urgent issues before they happen. freezer not cold enough - you get a notification, fryers not hot enough - you get a notification, employees not meeting their marks - you get a notification.

Exploration

We really went all in. We put raspberry pis on the doors to the bathroom and counted their opens, we added them to thermostats in the freezers, walk-ins, and fryers. We tracked drive-in volume, walk-in volume, and item order counts and measured it against historical week/week month/month data to create predictive models.    

Apart from technological updates, we then dug into the what and why and created incentive models. After x number of orders and door opens prompt a “hot potato” activity to stock napkins and straws. The employee to claim the hot potato got a point. Enough points equals a free meal.     

The system could also recognize volume and scheduling and then recommend certain team members go on break to help with labor costs. If certain members weren’t meeting targeting goals the system would us a sister company’s (Schoox) platform to offer video training. The only thing we didn’t offer was (a product you’ll see in another case study) a line buster.

the result

We set it up as a test environment in our office and then demoed it to several customers. While we didn’t have any takers, it solidified HotSchedules as a pioneer in restaurant management, and did help us sell to new customers. It was a ton of fun, and it really pushed me outside of my comfort zone. The processes I learned from this exercise have impacted the way I have thought about every product I’ve worked on since.    

This was just one of several attempts to apply disruptive tech to traditional products. I don’t have case studies for each but we also explored using the leap motion control to help back of house operations navigate orders. We tinkered with Google glass and augmented reality to assist with the same issue. We applied OCR technologies for inventory management. This was the catalyst for our version of thinking outside the box.

final thoughts

Disruptive technology and innovation are often times really difficult to socialize. This project was foundational for the way I think about the what of all new projects. There are other case studies that had a huge impact on the why and the who, but this project in particular opened my eyes to world outside of the screen design. Before there was a term of product designer this was the project that moved me into that category. It wasn’t about UX, it wasn’t about UI, it extended beyond those two terms. It was what is something that is so insane it will reshape the landscape, and can we monetize it? And while it didn’t get to see the light of day in a real restaurant, it was kind of like my Paul’s Boutique. Arguably one of the greatest album’s ever made, but by all metrics a colossal failure.

final thoughts

The result

JASON REYNOLDS

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