THE BAR MAP
As supervisor, I saw the same problem from two sides — the front, where guests wait on reservations and staff scramble to keep the room organized; and the back, where the team needed clarity just to know what to do and when. I ended up redesigning both.
Table & Screen Maps:
Reservations were the first fix. Staff needed a fast, visual way to see the room and assign tables without guessing — so I designed a new table map system built around clarity and speed, made for the pace of a busy shift, not a quiet office.
Screens came next. A sports bar lives and dies by getting the right game on the right TV at the right time — with multiple games running at once, staff needed a system to assign what played where without confusion or lost time mid-service. I built a screen map to solve exactly that.
Signage & Table Tools
Two small physical fixes made a bigger difference than their size suggests:
Reusable reservation signs — instead of writing a name and throwing the sign away after each booking, I designed signs that could be easily erased and reused, cutting waste and saving staff a step during a busy shift.
Glass-placement stickers — small table stickers marking exactly where to leave glasses, so staff always knew where to find and place them without thinking twice.
Neither was complicated. Both removed friction from moments staff repeat dozens of times a shift.
Internal Communication
The last piece was entirely internal: making sure the team always knew what was expected of them.
I redesigned the checklist system so staff could clearly see which tasks were assigned to them — no more asking, no more assuming. I also reworked the visual layout of the rota, making it easier to read at a glance, especially useful during a fast handover between shifts.
Results
Service got faster, complaints dropped, and the floor ran more efficiently across the board. It's the same instinct I bring to design work — less about one clever solution, more about making every part of a system work together.
REFLECTION
None of these fixes were complicated on their own. What mattered was seeing the whole system — reservations, screens, signage, tasks, scheduling — as connected pieces of the same experience, and redesigning each one so the next person, whether staff or guest, could move through their part without friction. It's the same instinct I bring to design work: less about one clever solution, more about making every part of the system work together.