Navigation & IA Redesign for Toast Web
Proposed Q2 2025
Overview
Toast is an all-in-one platform for restaurant operators, handling POS, payroll, scheduling, and reporting, now expanding into management of other business verticals. As features grew, the web experience became complex, making key tasks hard for operators to find and complete.
I co-led a cross-organizational effort to redesign the global navigation and information architecture of Toast’s back office web experience to improve wayfinding, reduce cognitive load, and align with customer mental models—while balancing business needs, scalability, and future growth.
MY ROLE
Design co-lead
SCOPE
Cross-product web experience
SKILLS
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Information architecture
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Taxonomy
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Design facilitation
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Stakeholder buy-in
OUTCOME
A scalable IA foundation that improved discoverability and reduced cognitive load across the platform
My Responsibilities
I joined this initiative following two previous pilots, co-leading it end-to-end in close partnership with:
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Designers, product managers, and engineering leads across multiple domains
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Toast’s Customer Advisory Board to validate their mental models
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Executive stakeholders to align on platform direction
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My responsibilities included:
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Framing IA decisions as user + business tradeoffs, not aesthetic preferences
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Creating alignment across teams with competing priorities
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Advocating for a navigation system that balanced short-term initiatives with long-term scalability
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Making clear recommendations when consensus wasn’t possible
Problem
As Toast expanded its product suite, the web navigation grew organically:
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Features were added without a cohesive IA strategy
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Similar tasks lived in multiple places
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Legacy tools and pages were abandoned with no clear ownership
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Internal tools appeared alongside customer-facing products
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Navigation labels reflected internal teams rather than operator mental models
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Multiple navigation styles caused a disjointed experience​
This resulted in:
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Operators struggling to find core workflows and becoming disoriented
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Poor visibility into what experience customers were seeing
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Increased support tickets and enablement burden
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Slower onboarding and adoption of newer products
Additionally, Toast’s product suite had evolved organically around restaurant-specific workflows and the IA reflected restaurant-first assumptions. As Toast ventured into supporting new verticals, non-restaurant customers struggled to map their workflows cleanly into the system. ​
​The challenge wasn’t just redesigning a menu—it was re-architecting how operators understand Toast as a platform as we evolve from restaurant-focused to vertical-agnostic without breaking trust with existing operators.
Constraints & Complexity
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Multiple lines of business owning different areas of the nav
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A diverse global user base with varying levels of organizational size and complexity
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Legacy IA decisions deeply embedded in product workflows
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Need to ship incrementally without disrupting daily restaurant operations
Leadership Conflict & Strategic Tension
A major challenge in this work was navigating misalignment at the leadership level.
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Senior Leadership prioritized rapid AI adoption and visibility, pushing for prominent placement of:
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An agentic AI
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A customer support AI chat bot
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From an internal perspective, AI represented strategic differentiation and future growth
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From a customer perspective, these CTAs were disruptive, unclear in value, and misaligned with task-driven workflows
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At the same time, teams debated whether to persist with optimization for restaurant-specific use cases and develop multiple navigation and taxonomy variations tailored to each vertical, or to adopt a vertical-agnostic structure and taxonomy designed to accommodate future markets and hybrid customers that might not conform to a single category.
This made the navigation not just a design problem, but a platform strategy decision.
Discovery & Insights
Rather than starting with screens, we focused on understanding operator mental models.
Methods included:
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Card sorting and tree testing with restaurant operators
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Audit and analysis of navigation usage and support data
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Stakeholder interviews across product teams
Key insights:
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Operators think in jobs to be done, not Toast product lines
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Frequently used tasks were buried under rarely used sections
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Labels that made sense internally were confusing externally
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Operators relied heavily on muscle memory—any change had to be intentional and gradual
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Operators valued predictability and speed over experimentation in core workflows
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AI CTAs were often perceived as “extra” rather than essential
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Over-prioritizing AI in navigation increased cognitive load and reduced task efficiency
These insights shifted the project from a visual redesign to a fundamental IA rethink.
Design Strategy & Decisions
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Validation & Iteration
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Tested IA concepts through tree testing and usability studies
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Iterated based on qualitative feedback
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Partnered with engineering to support phased rollout to protect user muscle memory
Outcome & Impact
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Improved task findability across core operator workflows
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Reduced navigation clutter while accommodating new initiatives
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Reduced friction navigating between key areas of the platform
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Created a shared framework for evaluating future navigation requests (including AI)
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Enabled product teams to build toward non-restaurant verticals without restructuring the IA
Reflection
This work reinforced that navigation is a product strategy problem, not a UI problem. At scale, IA decisions shape how users understand an entire platform—and how teams build within it.
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If I were to revisit this project, I’d invest earlier in tooling and governance to help teams maintain IA consistency as Toast continued to grow.