Designing Data Insights For Restaurant Owners @Toast

OVERVIEW

Toast XtraChef customers choose the platform to make smarter financial decisions, cut costs, and improve efficiency—ultimately boosting profit margins. This project boosted user engagement on cost insights page by 18%, pNPS by 4, and received positive feedback from customers.

What problem were we solving?

The existing insights/reporting experience failed to meet this expectation.

Hard-to-find insights made it difficult for restaurant owners to take action.
Graphs lacked numerical context, making trends hard to interpret.
COGS was presented in isolation, without sales or labor cost comparisons.

This led to low engagement, reduced perceived value, and limited business impact.

Role: Lead product designer | Release: Oct 2024 (Ongoing iterative development)

🔗 See product demo

Engagement rate

+18%

Customer approval

NPS

4.4/5

+4

Metrics Comparison

Financial Overview

Drilldown Table

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Plain data without any explanation, when users come here they see nothing than a Excel sheet.

Convoluted reporting pages including COGS, Reporting, Analytics. Resulting in increasing detach rate of xtraCHEF and falling GMV.

Prioritizing the summary widget on the Dashboard for users to see the breakdown and overview of their Net Profit.

Up and front key metrics and comparison for health check, followed by breakdown of the metrics and which categories are influencing the metrics, for more detailed investigation.

Current

COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) insights

How might we empower restaurant owners with actionable cost insights?

We redesigned the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) insights experience for restaurant owners to see exact food costs, comparisons, and percentage changes in the big picture financial data.

The data science fueled actionable insights enable restaurant owners to make better business decisions with confidence.

COGS: Cost of all the ingredients used to make the food and drinks to make the food and drinks a restaurant sells. Tracking COGS helps restaurant owners control costs, set prices, and maintain profits.

How far do we want to go when presenting metrics and insights?

Explorations on what is essential and what is good to have.
Question board of instinctive assumptions on what how users think.

A Piece within Toast Reporting Ecosystem

Connecting with designers of different pods on the north star of reporting

How can each pod's reporting represent overview for users and serve it as a PLG moment?

Toast Sales Summary

Only on xtraCHEF

Labor, Payroll, Employee

Identifying the Key Insights and Metrics

10 user interviews; affinity map of pain points; hypothesis-driven prototype

Users didn’t just want to see COGS numbers—they needed comparative context and holistic financial health insights.

📌 10 SMB restaurant owners & managers tested the design on mobile.

📌 Graphs alone lacked value—users needed precise data.
📌 Comparing costs over time was essential (e.g., month-over-month, year-over-year).
📌 COGS alone were not enough—users evaluated costs alongside sales and labor.

“I just want to see how this compares to last month without digging through multiple reports.”

— Seven testers

Pivoting MVP Design Approach

Prioritizing clarity, comparison, and actionability. First release Prioritization

We assumed graphs were essential for financial insights. Testing proved us wrong.

Instead of designing around trendy data visualizations, we focused on accurate data and actionable insights with clear numbers and comparisons.

Numbers First, Graphs Later – Key financial figures are now front and center.
Comparative Trends – Month-over-month and year-over-year views help users track fluctuations.
Holistic Financial Overview – COGS is now contextualized with sales and labor costs for a full picture.
Action-Oriented Recommendations – Smart insights like “Review vendor pricing trends” help users take informed action.

"Testing proved us wrong about relying on graphs. We prioritized clear numbers, comparisons, and actionable insights instead"

— I shared research findings in a stakeholder meeting

Metrics summary is essential for the first release, showcasing the core value prop

MVP shows the high-level overview of each category group

Drilldown functionality comes later, following the step of descriptive to diagnosis

Date range selection for comparison needs between two same duration of time:

This week vs, Last week
This 4 weeks vs. Last 4 weeks
etc.

Prioritizing Operating Summary Widget to Frame the Storytelling

How do we tell the story of COGs data and its connection with profits?

As we were focusing on the COGs insights page, I proposed shifting our attention a bit to the main entrance for users, the dashboard.

COGs data on its own is fragmented, does not connect with users' mental model
Users saw numbers but have to jump between Operating Summary to check how they impacted profits.
Apart from the MVP of COGs insights page, I designed a equation view of the Operating summary page to reduce the trouble and help users see the clear financial image.

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