Poorboy Coffee is a bootstrapped San Francisco coffee shop known for running their business with radical transparency — sharing their numbers and journey publicly. I designed a custom analytics dashboard that brought that whiteboard-on-the-wall approach into a clean, digital interface, giving them a real-time view of their key business metrics.
YEAR
2024
CATEGORY
UI DESIGN
RESEARCH
I researched how Poorboy Coffee operated — studying their public social content, their business model, and how they communicated with their audience. Competitor analysis helped identify what a useful, non-overwhelming dashboard looked like for an independent hospitality business at their stage.
DESIGN
The interface is built around clarity — presenting key metrics through clean visuals and a layout that's easy to scan at a glance. The colour palette was pulled directly from Poorboy Coffee's merchandise, grounding the dashboard in their existing brand identity and making it feel like a natural extension of the business rather than an external tool.
CHALLENGES
The main constraint was limited access to granular financial data — inventory, spending breakdowns, and tax figures weren't available. Rather than letting this stall the project, I designed the dashboard as a modular system: the sections built reflect what was available now, with the architecture ready to accommodate deeper financial data as the business scales and that information becomes accessible.
USER EXPERIENCE
The dashboard is designed for a non-technical business owner — clear labelling, consistent colour coding, and a visual hierarchy that lets Poorboy Coffee's team check performance at a glance without needing to interpret complex data.
SUMMARY
Poorboy Coffee got a dashboard that matched how they already think about their business — open, visual, and built around real numbers. The modular design means it grows with them: as more data becomes available, new sections can be added without redesigning from scratch. A practical tool for a business that takes its own transparency seriously.
