COMPASS DIGITAL
Menu Activity Log (Centric OS)
Role: Lead Product Designer
Timeline: 1 Month
15 minute read
Who is Compass Digital?
Compass group is the world's leading food service and hospitality company and Compass Digital is the innovation arm of Compass Group North America.
What is Centric OS?
Centric OS is a centralized operating system that manages food services for over 1000 business and higher education institutions. It integrates with partners such as Agilysys, FreedomPay, Nextep, Volante, and KDS.
🤓 Case Study TL;DR
Operations managers had no visibility into menu changges or publishing status, creating dependency on digital support for basic troubleshooting that accounted for 50% of ticket volume. We built an activity feed that translates technical events into plain language, enabling managers to self-diagnose issues and understand teammate changes for the first time. This virtually eliminated publishing status inquiries, drastically reduced support ticket volume, and improved resolution speed by allowing managers to include specific activity details when technical support was genuinely needed.
Understanding the problem
Operations managers cannot see changes made by other team members or see publish status updates with integrated partners on shared menus, which created dependency on digital support for basic troubleshooting that accounted for 50% of the ticket volume. Without activity logs capturing menu updates and publish events, managers were unable to identify who made changes or distinguish between normal delays or critical system failures when updates get published live.
Solution Overview
We built a comprehensive activity feed that captured all menu builder actions and publish events. The feed translated technical system events into plain language that operations managers can easily understand. The feed displayed time, user, and activity type for every event, with expandable details that enabled self-service troubleshooting rather than requiring developer interpretation through digital support.
Key Research Insights
Design Process Highlights
Key Design Decision: Item-level vs. Field-level Detail
Initially we were uncertain whether to display exactly what changed within each item (specific fields) or simply show that the item had been updated.. User research revealed that operators weren't sure what level of detail would be most helpful for troubleshooting. Rather than risk overwhelming users with granular field changes, we chose an item-level approach for the MVP, showing what items were updated without diving into specific field modifications.
This decision making involved close collaboration with the UX copywriter on messaging clarity and the frontend developer to confirm design pattern feasibility, while the backend developer helped identify all possible activity types and data returns to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Why this mattered:
This collaborative approach enabled quick delivery of clear and accessible activity logs while building a foundation that could evolve with user needs without requiring major architectural changes.
Below: A portion of the brainstorming/sketching done for the activity log done in excalidraw
Impact & Results
Dramatic Support Ticket Reduction
Publish status inquiries were virtually eliminated from the support queue, drastically reducing the ticket volume that previously accounted for 50% of digital care workload. This allowed support staff to focus on genuine technical issues requiring developer intervention.
Enhanced Self-Service Capability
Managers gained control and awareness over menu activities, reporting increased confidence in managing their operations independently. The activity feed enabled self-diagnosis of issues that previously required support escalation, particularly around publish delays and updates made by other team members.
Improved Communication & Understanding
Managers specifically appreciated the plain language used throughout the activity feed, finding it extremely easy to understand and making system activity transparent for the first time. This accessibility was crucial to enabling self-service troubleshooting.
Improved Ticket Quality & Resolution Speed
When technical support is genuinely needed, managers can now include specific activity log details with ticket submissions, providing digital care teams with complete context and eliminating time spent searching for diagnostic information.
Team Satisfaction & Efficiency
Digital support staff expressed significant satisfaction with the reduction in routine, self-diagnosable tickets, while operations managers felt more empowered and informed about their menu management processes.