Quantaco
Re-designing multiple applications to create a unified platform
MY ROLE
Senior Product Designer
TEAM
Head of Product, Customer Service team, Engineering
TOOLS
Figma, User-Interviews, Questionnaires
CONTEXT
Quantaco is a hospitality management platform used by pubs, clubs and restaurants across Australia to manage everything from sales and labour to compliance and cash reconciliation. I was brought on as the sole designer to audit their three core products; Salesline, Cashup and Star Compliance — with a specific brief: make them usable for a general, everyday consumer. Not a data analyst. A venue manager, closing up at midnight, or a bartender mid-shift.
My Role: end-to-end ownership of UX audit, visual design, and design system creation across all three products, plus the backend account-setup system, working directly with the Head of Product and Customer Service to ground every decision in real usage.
PROBLEM
Three products, three different experiences
Salesline, Cashup and Star Compliance had grown independently, which meant they looked and behaved like three separate companies rather than one platform. Each also lived in its own silo, with no shared data between them — so even though a venue's staffing, sales and compliance information was all connected in reality, the products didn't reflect that.
NO SHARED VISUAL LANGUAGE
Each product had its own patterns, components and conventions, so switching between them meant relearning the interface every time.
NO SHARED DATA
Information that lived in one product, labour costs, sales, compliance records couldn't be seen or leveraged from another, even when it was directly relevant.
DENSE, ACCOUNTING-FIRST DATA
The products were built around raw financial and operational data, presented in a way that assumed the user was comfortable reading spreadsheets, not glancing at a dashboard between service.
A WIDE RANGE OF USERS, WITH A WIDE RANGE OF COMPUTER LITERACY
The people actually using these products ranged from owners comfortable with reporting software to bartenders who just needed to get through a shift and the interfaces didn't account for that gap.
REAL-WORLD USAGE WAS BEING IGNORED
Products like Cashup required large amounts of data entry, often completed by venue staff at midnight or later, after a full shift. The interface wasn't designed with that level of fatigue or time pressure in mind.
NO MOBILE CONSIDERATION
Staff needed to check performance, log incidents and enter data on the floor, not just at a desk but the products were desktop-first (or desktop-only).
RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
Designing for four very different people
Working with the Head of Product and Customer Service team, I helped define the core personas using the platform, each with distinct goals and very different levels of comfort with software:
“When finishing the day, I want admin to be streamlined, so I don’t have to stay late or take work home after events.”
“When juggling admin, finances, and event operations, I want to feel organised and in control, so I can avoid the stress of things slipping through the cracks.”
— Venue Manager, GM, Licensee
“If I could just see stock levels or issues on my phone, that’d make life easier.”
“A clear shift brief would save so much confusion.”
“I love when things are automated — anything to make service smoother.”
— Bar Tender
“If it saves time, I’ll pay for it — if it adds friction, I won’t.”
“Give me a clear dashboard, not a spreadsheet nightmare.”
“Integrations should just work — I’m not a tech guy.”
— Owner
VENUE MANAGER
Overseeing bookings, coordinating staff, managing vendors, handling invoicing and expenses, keeping the venue profitable, managing compliance and reporting. Needs a broad, at-a-glance view across everything.
ACCOUNTANT / BOOKKEEPER
The one persona genuinely comfortable with dense financial data — needed depth and accuracy over simplicity.
This spread was the real design challenge: a single product had to work for someone who wanted maximum detail, and someone who just wanted to get through their closing checklist and go home.
OWNER
Financial management, strategic decisions, compliance, staffing, supplier relationships, marketing, troubleshooting operations. Often checking in remotely, not on-site.
BARTENDER
Serving drinks, maintaining bar operations, handling POS transactions, stock rotation, cleaning, customer-facing work, supporting the shift lead. Typically has the least time and lowest tolerance for a fiddly interface — often the person entering data late at night or logging an incident mid-shift.
PROCESS
Design system first, products second — built in parallel
Rather than redesigning three products from scratch in isolation, I established a shared foundation and applied it as I worked through each product, so the system was being stress-tested against real screens from day one.
Adopting Moon Design System as a base
Rather than building a component library from zero, I used Moon Design System as a foundation and adapted it with Quantaco's branding. This meant I could focus my time on solving actual product problems rather than reinventing basic components.
[Add: screenshot of Moon base components vs. Quantaco-branded versions]
Extending it where it fell short
Moon didn't cover everything, particularly mobile-specific patterns. Where gaps existed, I designed new components from scratch and folded them back into the system so they were reusable across all three products going forward.
[Add: examples of new/custom components built, especially mobile-specific ones]
Working product-by-product, in collaboration
For each of the three products, the process looped between:
Reviewing customer service feedback and support tickets for that product
Working with the Head of Product to prioritise fixes vs. full redesigns
Applying the design system and rebuilding the visual layer
Designing for desktop and mobile in parallel, with each persona's needs in mind
SOLUTION
Salesline — wage and labour data at a glance
Salesline compares sales against active labour costs, which meant the core job was surfacing a comparison, not just a number. I focused on dashboard-first design: key ratios and trends visible immediately, with drill-down available for anyone (like an Owner or Accountant) who needed the underlying detail.
[Add: before/after of Salesline dashboard, desktop + mobile]
Cashup — a glorified spreadsheet, made humane
Cashup's core task is heavy manual data entry, reconciling a venue's takings at the end of a shift. Knowing this was often done by tired bartenders late at night, I focused on:
Reducing the number of steps and taps required to enter a full day's data
Clear visual states for what's complete, incomplete, or flagged as a discrepancy
Larger, more forgiving input patterns suited to fast, low-attention entry
A layout that still felt structured like a spreadsheet (familiar) but guided the user through it (intuitive)
[Add: before/after of Cashup entry flow]
Star Compliance — mobile-first, guided, in-the-moment
Star Compliance covers incident reporting, daily checklists, staff training and shift oversight, the kind of tasks that happen in the moment, on the floor, not sitting at a desk. A bartender reporting an incident, or a manager working through an opening checklist, needed something as quick and frictionless as sending a text, not filling out a form.
With that in mind, I designed the product mobile-first, prioritising:
A guided, step-by-step flow for incident reporting, rather than a single dense form, breaking tasks like capturing an incident (with photo or video evidence) into small, sequential steps that felt natural to complete quickly, one-handed, mid-shift
Checklists and procedures designed as interactive, tappable flows rather than static lists, so staff always knew what was next and what was already done
Clear, low-effort feedback states (complete, overdue, flagged) so a Venue Manager or Owner could see compliance health at a glance without digging through records
Applying the same design system components used across Salesline and Cashup, so the interactive elements felt familiar even though the flow itself was built specifically for a fast, mobile-first, on-the-move context
[Add: before/after or flow screens of incident reporting / checklist completion, ideally showing the step-by-step mobile flow]
This made Star Compliance the clearest example in the suite of designing for one specific persona's real physical context. Someone standing at a bar or walking the floor, phone in hand, needing to log something and move on.
The Configurator — setting the foundation from day one
Beyond the customer-facing products, I also designed the Configurator, the internal backend system used to set up new accounts coming onto the platform. This was a key piece of the bigger picture: it's where a new venue's data structure gets established, which meant getting it right had a flow-on effect into how well data could later be shared across products.
[Add: screenshots of Configurator flows]
The bigger vision - one hub, shared data
The real ambition behind the audit wasn't just to make three products look related, it was to make them behave like one platform. I worked towards a single dashboard hub: a home screen holding the most important information across all products at a glance, personalised to whichever persona was looking at it, that a user could then jump out and into Salesline, Cashup or Star Compliance to do the detailed "grunt work" when needed.
This meant designing for shared data across applications — so, for example, labour data captured in Salesline could inform what a Venue Manager sees on their hub without them needing to open the product itself.
[Add: hub/dashboard concept screens]
Consistent, responsive foundations across all three
Every product was rebuilt to work across desktop and mobile, using the same design system, so a manager moving between Salesline in the morning, Star Compliance mid-shift and Cashup at close of night was working within one familiar visual language.
IMPACT
Consistency across the suite
All three products now share a single visual language, reducing the learning curve when staff use more than one.
Designed for the full range of users
By explicitly designing around four distinct personas with varying computer literacy, the products became usable by the person actually on shift — not just the person who signed the contract.
Reduced friction on time-sensitive tasks
By making Star Compliance mobile-first and guided rather than form-heavy, staff could log incidents and complete checklists in the moment, rather than delaying documentation until they were back at a desk.
A reusable foundation for future products
The design system built during this project set up Quantaco's product team to design new features and products faster, without starting from zero each time.
Groundwork for a unified platform
The hub concept and Configurator work laid the foundation for Quantaco to move from "a suite of separate tools" towards a genuinely connected platform.
REFLECTION
Designing one interface that has to work for a bartender and an accountant is a real tension. how did you handle that in practice? Progressive disclosure? Role-based views?
The hub/shared-data vision is ambitious — how far did it get in your time there? Fully shipped, partially shipped, or a direction you set for the team to continue?
Star Compliance's mobile-first, guided approach was a different design problem to the dashboard-heavy Salesline/Cashup work — what did that contrast teach you?
What was it like being the sole designer responsible for both the customer-facing products and the internal Configurator?