A real-time coordination system that replaced one Operations Manager's memory with a shared digital task board, deployed live to 189 volunteers at a food pantry serving 400+ families a month.
Every distribution session, volunteers showed up with no advance notice, working through donations nobody could plan for until the boxes were opened. All of that knowledge lived in one Operations Manager's head.
Partway in, we discovered a prior semester's research had been fabricated and restarted from scratch: stakeholder interviews, field observation, a live dot-survey experiment, and a review of 20+ sources on pantry operations.
Two directions were on the table: live inventory tracking, or volunteer coordination. The Operations Manager's most acute problem was coordination, so that's what we built — accessed by QR code and volunteers' own phones instead of $1,000–$2,000 in dedicated tablets.
Volunteers ranged from 60 to 80 years old with wide variation in tech comfort: 60×60px touch targets, one action per screen, no more than two taps to anything.
"I typed my phone number in Google and the first four things were my family. That's terrifying." Operations Manager · March 25, 2026
That's why experienced volunteers log in with the last four digits of their phone number instead of the full thing.
We started with three states. The workshop surfaced a fourth: tasks abandoned mid-way, which the old paper system had no way to flag.
Click a card to move it through the states. Incomplete tasks roll over to the next session automatically.
Flagged a tag filter bar volunteers kept tapping by mistake, expecting it to take them somewhere rather than filter the list.
All three sessions independently flagged that same filter. 100% task completion, zero critical errors.
189 volunteers, a full Wednesday session, and no paper backup — the Operations Manager's own call, because he trusted it. It held up.
"A volunteer does half a job, and 30 others see it crossed out and skip it. The whole rack ends up empty." Operations Manager Observer · Workshop conclusion meeting
Within 48 hours of the workshop, the Operations Manager's team had already labeled the warehouse bays and updated the paper board — on their own, before we discussed the findings.
64+ screens across three roles, built on React, Firebase, and Tailwind, deployed on Vercel. Zero ongoing cost. Fully handed off to the church's IT contact.
Same design system across two modules — Pantry and Delivery — and every role from Operations Manager down to a first-time volunteer.
No baseline was measured before deployment, so the 60% interruption-reduction target is still a hypothesis. Inventory tracking is still unbuilt. And it's one pantry — the structural problems generalize, but the interface decisions were shaped by this specific building and community.
"From zero to one product. From research to handing off the product. This is a big thing for us." — Tanishq Sardar, March 25, 2026