Case Study

Smart Checklist: Transforming an Operational Tool into a Scalable Workflow Platform

  • Role: UX Manager / UX Lead
  • Company: Yum! Brands
  • Team: Cross-functional team of PMs, engineers, ops stakeholders, 2 product designers, 2 Design System designers
  • Duration: 6 months
  • Scope: UX strategy, research synthesis, stakeholder alignment, multi-phase redesign, design system creation, rollout strategy

Some details and visuals have been redacted or adapted to protect proprietary information. The case study emphasizes leadership approach and outcomes over exact designs.

1. Context & Challenge

Smart Checklist is an internal operational tool used by restaurant teams to complete critical shift tasks and maintain consistency across food quality, service speed, and daily execution.

Through ongoing feedback from frontline users, internal feedback channels, and user interviews, we identified that shift leaders lacked the clarity and confidence needed to complete tasks efficiently during busy shifts. The experience made it difficult to understand which tasks required action, what had already been completed, and whether steps were being done correctly.

Problem statement:
The Checklist experience did not provide shift leaders with enough clarity, guidance, or confidence to complete operational tasks efficiently and consistently.

Strategic goal:
Redesign Checklist into a clearer, more reliable workflow experience that helps restaurant teams complete the right tasks at the right time with less effort and greater confidence.

Success metrics:
To evaluate impact, we focused on both user experience and operational efficiency signals:

  1. overall satisfaction
  2. ease of navigation
  3. confidence in task completion
  4. checklist completion rates
  5. usage patterns across restaurants and markets.

2. My Role

As UX Lead, I led the product experience transformation across research, strategy, design direction, stakeholder alignment, and phased rollout.

My responsibility was not only to improve the interface, but to create a shared product direction that connected user needs, operational priorities, and scalable design execution.

I led the work by:

  • Synthesizing user feedback, behavioral signals, and stakeholder input into a clear UX opportunity.
  • Defining the experience strategy around clarity, simplicity, confidence, and operational efficiency.
  • Guiding the design team through discovery, prototyping, validation, iteration, and rollout.
  • Partnering with Product, Engineering, Operations, Brands, and Market leaders to align priorities and success criteria.
  • Translating frontline user needs into product decisions that also supported business goals.
  • Creating alignment across multiple teams so the redesign could move forward in phases instead of becoming a one-off visual refresh.
  • Initiating the creation of a Design System team within the squad to improve consistency, accessibility, documentation, and engineering collaboration.

This became a cross-functional UX leadership effort: aligning people, product direction, design quality, and scalable delivery.

3. Strategy

Because the product touched daily restaurant operations, a big-bang redesign would have introduced too much risk. I structured the work as a phased UX strategy that allowed us to validate improvements, build confidence, and gradually expand the product experience.

The strategy had three stages:

  1. Fix immediate usability barriers.
  2. Evolve the interface and create scalable product foundations.
  3. Build toward a smarter, more adaptive experience layer.
This approach helped us balance user impact, technical feasibility, business priorities, and stakeholder confidence.

4. Process

Stage 1: Business Alignment and User Validation

The first stage focused on reducing friction in the existing experience while building alignment around the redesign direction.

I partnered with Product, Operations, and Brand stakeholders to clarify which problems had the highest user and business impact. Together, we identified improvements that could simplify task completion without disrupting existing operational workflows.

We then validated the direction through usability testing with restaurant managers and frontline users.

Key focus areas included:

  • Simplifying core task flows.
  • Improving task readability and hierarchy.
  • Making task states easier to understand.
  • Reducing cognitive load during shifts.
  • Creating a clearer path to completion.

Once validated, we launched the first set of improvements and began tracking qualitative feedback and behavioral signals.

This stage created the confidence needed to move from tactical UX fixes toward a broader product evolution.

Stage 2: Product Expansion and UI Evolution

With stronger confidence from Stage 1, we expanded the scope from usability improvements to a more strategic product experience.

UX team led a second round of research to better understand how users engaged with Checklist in real restaurant environments: what they expected from the tool, what was missing, and what would make the experience feel more useful and reliable.

At the same time, my team collaborated closely with Brand and Market leaders to understand broader operational needs and identify scalable feature opportunities.

A key insight was that the product needed not just new screens, but a more consistent and accessible experience foundation. UX proposed a modernized UI direction and initiated a dedicated Design System effort inside the squad.

The Design System work included:

  • Modular, reusable UI components.
  • Accessibility improvements.
  • Clear interaction patterns.
  • Documentation for designers and engineers.
  • Alignment workflows to improve collaboration with Engineering.

The result was bigger than the Checklist redesign itself. The new UI foundation became a shared component library that could support other internal tools, improving consistency and speed across the product ecosystem.

This shifted the work from a single-product redesign to a scalable design infrastructure effort.

Stage 3: Intelligence Layer

The third stage is focused on making the experience more adaptive and proactive.

The UX direction is centered on reducing user effort through guidance, personalization, intelligent defaults, and context-aware recommendations.

While specific features remain confidential, the strategic goal is to help restaurant teams focus less on interpreting the tool and more on completing the right actions at the right time.

This stage continues to be shaped through user feedback, product analytics, competitive research, and operational priorities.

5. Outcomes

This project was not just a redesign. It created a more user-centered, scalable approach to internal product development.

Measured UX Improvements

Year-over-year survey results showed meaningful improvement across key experience metrics:

  • Overall satisfaction increased from 59% to 72%.
  • Ease of navigation increased from 60% to 70%.
  • Confidence in task completion increased from 63% to 71%.

These improvements showed that users found the product easier to navigate, more understandable, and more reliable in supporting daily task execution.

Product and Organizational Impact

Beyond the survey results, the project created several broader outcomes:

  • Improved clarity and usability for frontline restaurant teams.
  • Reduced uncertainty around task status and completion.
  • Created a stronger foundation for tracking task completion, time-on-task, and operational efficiency.
  • Established a scalable UI and component foundation for future internal tools.
  • Improved collaboration between Design and Engineering through shared documentation and reusable patterns.
  • Increased stakeholder confidence in UX as a strategic partner, not just a delivery function.

Business Impact Framework

To connect UX improvements to operational value, we defined a measurement approach using product analytics and operational indicators.

Key signals included:

  • Checklist completion rates.
  • Average time spent per checklist.
  • Task duration.
  • Error or missed-task frequency.
  • Usage patterns across restaurants and teams.

Reducing time spent on routine checklist tasks can translate into meaningful efficiency gains at scale. Even small time savings per shift can compound across stores, employees, and markets.

This gave the team a clearer way to evaluate future ROI through reduced effort, improved productivity, and stronger operational consistency.

Bar chart titled 'Distribution in answer results' displaying user sentiment across four survey questions related to the HutBot experience. Each question shows response percentages across five satisfaction levels, from 'Highly Dissatisfied' to 'Highly Satisfied'. Highlights include: 59% of users are highly satisfied overall, 60% find navigation easy, 63% feel confident completing tasks, and 58% believe the features are relevant to their needs.

“It’s so much easier to use!” – Frontline user feedback shared in company chat

6. What Made This Work Successful

The success of this project came from treating UX as a strategic lever rather than a visual layer.

Instead of jumping directly into redesigning screens, I helped the team align around the real problem, validate the direction with users, and build the product in phases.

This allowed us to:

  • Move quickly without overloading users or teams.
  • Balance short-term improvements with long-term scalability.
  • Build trust with stakeholders through evidence and iteration.
  • Create design foundations that extended beyond one product.
  • Connect user experience improvements to business and operational outcomes.

7. Next Steps

The next phase focuses on scaling the product experience and deepening the intelligence layer.