Pizza Hut - Store Admin
When Pizza Hut sunset its legacy store management platform, the U.S. business needed a new operational experience without disrupting day-to-day restaurant operations.
Working within an aggressive timeline, I designed foundational workflows that enabled franchise operators to manage store availability, fulfillment, inventory, notifications, and operational controls while extending Maverick, Pizza Hut International's existing design system, with new patterns for U.S. operations.
Tools
6,800+ stores
Duration
12 months
Impact
6,800+ stores
Role
Senior Product Designer
01
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Building the Operational Backbone for 6,800+ Pizza Hut Restaurants
As Pizza Hut prepared to sunset its legacy store management platform, Quikorder, the U.S. business needed a new operational system capable of supporting thousands of franchise locations.
Working within aggressive timelines, I designed Store Admin, the operational internal tool that allowed stores to adapt to changing business conditions while extending Maverick, the design system used by 6,800+ Pizza Hut international stores.
My Role
Instead of recreating the legacy experience screen-for-screen, I partnered across Product, Engineering, and Operations to build a new Store Admin experience using the Maverick design system as foundation.
02
Research & Discovery
What users said
I worked closely with franchise operators, operations teams, product managers, and business stakeholders, to conduct a research sprint.
By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, I built a deep understanding of user pain points and business context in the current experience.
Key Insights
Operations Are Messy
Restaurants constantly adjust to staffing shortages, promotions, inventory constraints, and local conditions.
Edge cases are the product in operations
Split hours, temporary closures, neighborhood delivery restrictions, and payment limitations weren't exceptions, they were everyday operational needs.
Visibility Creates Confidence
Managers needed to quickly understand what changed, who changed it, and whether action was required.
03
THE CHALLENGE
What started as a one-off request quickly exposed the limits of a global system.
Store Admin began with a single request and an assumption: we could leverage the existing Maverick design system and adapt its patterns directly for U.S. operations.
So I moved quickly, designing one request at a time. But without visibility into what was coming next, I was solving for the immediate use case rather than the experience as a whole.
As new requirements emerged, the differences between Maverick and U.S. operations became harder to ignore. Patterns that seemed like an apples-to-apples fit for one feature often couldn't accommodate the next. Each new feature exposed limitations in decisions we had already designed and developed—creating a cycle of redesign and engineering rework.
Example: Edit Store Info
BEFORE
(Maverick pattern)
AFTER
(U.S. Operations)
Added Edit Store Info
Separated editing from viewing to support more complex store management.
Email Notifications
Introduced new functionality beyond the original Maverick pattern.
Expanded Status History
Scaled the experience to support richer activity tracking.
Pagination
Added pagination as the volume of history outgrew the original design.
04
THE PIVOT
I shifted from responding to requirements to helping define them.
As I became involved earlier in planning, I started looking beyond individual stories to understand the broader operational problems we were solving.
Notifications became the first opportunity to put that into practice.
————
These became the foundation for:
Availability Management
Fulfillment Controls
Notification & Audit Patterns
Restriction Frameworks
Bulk Actions
Operational Status Patterns
The result was a more scalable product and a stronger Maverick design system.
—-
To support the U.S. market, I explored multiple approaches for features that didn't exist in the existing design system, balancing real-life complexity with ease of use.
Availability Management
I explored different models for managing store hours, including split schedules, temporary closures, recurring exceptions, and future changes to better support day-to-day operations.
Restriction Management
Stores had limited control over delivery zones, payment methods, and third-party aggregators. I designed a flexible framework that gave operators more control while keeping management centralized and scalable.
Centralized Notification Management
Critical notifications was spread across multiple systems and workflows. I explored several iterations of a centralized notification hub that brought together stock alerts, operational updates, and scheduled changes into a single view.
This exploration expanded Store Admin from a configuration tool into a more flexible platform for managing store operations.
Phase 1
Tile Foundation
Improve decision confidence
Stronger price prominence
Deal summary
Clear deal hierarchy
Phase 2
Deal Discovery
Support exploration
Discovery Badges
Intent-based browsing
Filters & Sorting
Phase 3
Brand Experience
Increase engagement
Rich merchandising
Enhanced imagery
Campaign moments
Phase 4
Personalization
Scale relevance
Adaptive modules
Behavioral ranking
Recommendations
05
EXECUTION
Content
Content
Content
Testing Operational Edge Cases
Design decisions were tested with franchisees, store managers, and restaurant employees in realistic scenarios.
Execution
—-
Rather than walking through every feature chronologically, I'd make this section a gallery of hero systems, each with a concise story and visual.
CAROUSEL
—
Operational Flexibility
Store Availability
Designed a flexible scheduling framework supporting adjusted hours, temporary closures, split-hour operations, and recurring exceptions without increasing operational complexity.
Fulfillment Controls
Delivery Restrictions & Aggregator Management
Designed new operational controls allowing stores to temporarily restrict deliveries by address, street, or neighborhood, manage third-party aggregators, and adjust payment methods based on staffing, safety, or business conditions.
Visual: Delivery restriction map + toggles
Operational Awareness
Centralized Notification Hub
Replaced fragmented alerts with a unified operational hub, helping managers quickly identify critical updates while introducing audit history to improve transparency and trust.
Visual: Notification center + change history
Spotlight: Future Ordering Controls
During the $2 Personal Pan Pizza promotion, stores began receiving overwhelming volumes of future orders before shifts had even started.
Working closely with Operations, I designed controls that allowed managers to quickly disable or limit future ordering, giving stores the flexibility to protect capacity without shutting down online ordering entirely.
Placeholder metrics
↓ 42% fulfillment-related support requests
5,800+ stores adopted the control
↓ 18% guest wait times during promotion
+23% operator satisfaction
This became one of the clearest examples of how thoughtful operational tooling can directly support business performance.
Visual: Before/after timeline + future ordering controls
Design System Contributions
Throughout the project, I extended Maverick with reusable operational patterns that continue supporting future Store Admin capabilities.
Patterns introduced included:
Availability
Restrictions
Bulk Actions
Notifications
Audit History
Operational Status
Visual: Pattern library cards
Hypothesis
If customers understand what a deal includes at first glance, they will require fewer exploratory clicks while maintaining (or improving) downstream conversion.thesis
PROCESS
Working with CRO and product teams, I created four concepts to isolate the impact of information hierarchy, deal summaries, and price prominence for Phase 1.
Metrics Tested
CVR, CTR, RPV, AOV
06
RESULTS
Before
Deal contents hidden until entering the builder
Repeated exploratory clicks to compare offers
High cognitive effort before selecting a deal
After
Deal summaries surfaced directly within each tile
Faster value comparison during browsing
Higher decision confidence before checkout
0.76%
-
Exploratory CTR
Fewer exploratory interactions indicated stronger decision confidence and less comparison effort.
0.88%
+
Conversion Lift
Clearer deal comprehension translated into stronger downstream conversion.
0.86%
+
Revenue per Visitor
Customers generated more value despite spending less time exploring.
0.73%
-
Average Order Value
High-value offers naturally attracted more attention, creating an opportunity to improve merchandising distribution in future iterations.
Impact beyond Phase 1
The experiment established an experimentation framework the team could build on. Each following phase introduced one new behavioral hypothesis while preserving what had already been validated.
07
WHAT'S NEXT
Building on the foundation.
Phase 1 proved that clarity improves decision confidence. The remaining roadmap focused on layering discovery, merchandising, and personalization without reintroducing cognitive load.
Phase 1 -> Done
Foundation
Help users understand deals.
Phase 2
Discovery
Help users discover more without thinking harder.
Phase 3
Brand
Create emotional moments after trust has been established.
Phase 4
Personalization
Surface the right deal at the right time.
08
REFLECTION
Clarity changed behavior.
THINGS I BELIEVE NOW
Start smaller than you think.
The biggest improvements came from strengthening the smallest building block of the experience.
Measure customer behavior, not just clicks.
Metrics rarely tell the full story in isolation. Lower exploratory clicks initially appeared negative, but customer behavior revealed this was due to greater customer confidence and reduced decision friction.
Build systems, not screens.
The most valuable outcome wasn't a single winning interface, it was an experimentation framework the team could continue learning from.
