Expedição
Making multi-kitchen dispatch legible at a glance
- Logistics
- Delivery
- Operations
- Client
- Movile
- Year
- 2016
- Discipline
- Design
- Role
- Product Designer & Product Specialist
What I did
- End-to-end design of the dispatch app, covering both kitchen pickup and driver handoff
- QR scanning as the single primitive for every handoff in the chain
- Colour-as-state screens readable across a noisy dispatch floor
- Slot codes to make the physical staging area addressable
- Operator and driver flows, including enqueue, assignment and unlock
- Component library and iconography for the operational states
Delivery Center, at the time one of Movile’s companies, ran a dispatch floor fed by several kitchens at once. Orders had to be collected from each kitchen, staged, and handed to the right driver — and every one of those handoffs was a place the order could go quiet.
The problem
The operation had two halves that were being managed as if they were one: pickup from the kitchens, and dispatch to the drivers. Between them sat a staging area where an order was physically present but informationally invisible.
That produced the usual failure modes of a busy floor:
- No live position. An order was “somewhere between the kitchen and the bike”, which is not a state anyone can act on.
- Handoffs left no trace. When an order went missing, there was no record of who last held it.
- The floor is a bad reading environment. Loud, fast, and no one is going to stop and parse a table.
What I did
The app was designed around a single idea: every change of custody is a scan, and the scan is what makes the operation legible.
One primitive, used everywhere. QR scanning covers kitchen pickup, staging, driver assignment and handoff. There is one gesture to learn, and each scan writes the timestamp and the holder, so the order’s history assembles itself from work people were already doing.
Colour carries the state, not text. Scan screens go full-bleed green, red or neutral for confirmed, rejected and pending. On a dispatch floor the answer has to survive being read at arm’s length, in motion, in a second — so the state is the whole screen rather than a label on it.
The staging area got addresses. Short slot codes (A1, D1) turn “put it down somewhere” into a location the next person can be sent to, which is what closes the gap between kitchen and driver.
Two roles, one model. Operator and driver flows share the same underlying object and the same scan, so the app is a single account of the order rather than two systems reconciling after the fact.