MenuLogic
Year
06/2021-09/2021
Role
UX Designer
MenuLogic is an administrative dashboard for school nutrition management. The application provides school district-wide profit/loss calculation, menu creation & state nutrition policy tracking, growth management, administrative report generation, and planning & forecasting functionalities.
Highlights
MENULOGIC
Client
User
School District Directors
Scope
UX/UI Redesigns of several pages throughout the application, as well as visual improvements.
Project Overview
My client was the founder of MenuLogic K12.
MenuLogic is an administrative dashboard for school nutrition management primarily used by school district directors in the state of Indiana. The application provides the following functionality:
-
School district-wide profit/loss calculation
-
Menu creation & state nutrition policy tracking
-
Growth management
-
Administrative report generation
-
Menu Planning & forecasting
My client reached out with a desire to redesign her dashboard experience in an effort to make her product more marketable. Existing MenuLogic K12 users were limited to district directors within the state of Indiana, but she had the desire to begin to more broadly market and sell her software to school district directors in neighboring states.
In order to create a more marketable product, she was also interested in exploring several other visual improvements that could assist her with attracting new customers.
Original Dashboard
This is the original MenuLogic dashboard:
This page provided limited information to district directors, but the information presented was fairly narrow & not very useful, and was presented with no clear hierarchy or importance. My client was interested in increasing the amount of valuable data presented while removing less valuable information, & essentially turning this dashboard into a singular source of truth for her users.
Prior to reaching out to me, my client contacted an agency to help her with this project.
My client contacted a custom software development agency with the same request - fit all of her required data onto the dashboard, simplistically, with the goal of creating a clean, marketable application. This is the dashboard proposal she received from the agency:
Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t happy with the design they proposed, so she reached out to me.
Due to this application being used by school district directors, a single director could be overseeing several dozen schools' worth of data in one dashboard. The main challenge of redesigning the dashboard became one of minimalism & balance. With so much data to display, I wanted to ensure that I wasn’t causing cognitive overload to users who were just onboarding or being sold this product.
Additionally, with my client's desire to sell her product more widely, I also needed to design the application in a way that catered to unique data layouts that might come from nutrition policy variability/differences in other states.
This project began as just redesigning the dashboard experience of the MenuLogic app with various other visual improvements. Eventually, the scope increased, and we ultimately redesigned the Login screen, Nav pane, and Dashboard, while also improving UI on the Look up & Forecast page, Production Records, District Settings, and Reporting pages.
After several rounds of iteration, here are the final designs for highlighted areas.
Dashboard
The newly imaged dashboard displays new, clearer, prioritized data for directors to manage and oversee dozens of schools & their relevant nutrition information, revenue, expenses, menu participation & practices, and much more. The goal of this redesign was to create clear hierarchy, distinction between data sets, while maintaining the application's current branding, theme, & basic UI patterns.
Login
We freshly imagined the login screen, which you can find here.
Lookup & Forecast
This page was given its own navigation menu item. Previously, it was hidden inside a tab on another page of the application, and was consistently missed. My client wanted to make it more visible, so we moved it to it's own section.
Main Navigation Pane
In an effort to freshen up the site, we refreshed the main navigation pane, adding more delightful colors, UI, focus/hover states, and badge functionality.