McDonald's Feel Good Redesign
The McDonald’s App (GMALite) facilitates mobile ordering, delivery, and offer redemption via in-restaurant code scanning. Operating in approximately 65 markets, it serves over 300 million app customers monthly (about 3 million daily).
Year
2021–2024
Team
Design Director, 2 more product designers
My Role
User Experience Design, Visual Design, Usability Testing, Design System, Leadership and Collaborations, Analytics, A/B testing
Deals screen with Loyalty Programme
Background and Goal
In 2019, McDonald’s introduced the "FeelGood" design principles, which emphasize: Confidently humble; Familiar yet surprising.
To align with these principles, the app's visual design required updates. Five key redesign goals were set:
Consistency across iOS and Android
Updated Look & Feel
Flexibility for localized content management
Loyalty Program (MyMcDonald's): Enhanced brand style, user experience, and configurability
Accessibility
Challenges
The app's configurability across markets posed a challenge, with varied flows and limited documentation, necessitating a new approach to information gathering. Additionally, the absence of a usability testing budget meant that most testing relied on informal, in-office guerrilla methods.tion was a significant hurdle, as the app supports 30+ languages, sometimes leading to inconsistencies with the global design system.
Results
Comparing the first six months of GMAL3 (the redesigned app) to the last six months of GMAL2 (the previous version) reveals the following:
+3.51%
New users registrations
+24.6%
Deals redemptions per user
+20.4%
Loyalty points burnt per user
New registrations (users that create an account divided by those who downloaded the app) increased to 33.47% (46276253 total new users /15490800 new users that registered) from 29.96% (41861043 total new users / 12542914 new users that registered).
Redemptions per user increased to 3.85 per user, from 3.09 per user on the old app.
Loyalty points burnt per user went up to 454 per user, from 377 per user.
User Experience & Usability Testing Case Study
The redesign aimed to streamline and clarify key user flows like "Redeem the Deal" and "Redeem Unused Reward" due to user frustration and technical updates. Some flows also needed to be created from scratch to match new requirements.
I focused on the Deals & Rewards section, gathering configuration details and organizing edge cases in Figma for development. Usability testing in Maze helped validate the “Redeem Deal by Scanning QR Code” flow, testing 3 options with 5 respondents each. While the preferred option was identified, stakeholders chose to retain the current version due to market preferences.
Challenges
The highly configurable McDonald's app varied across markets, creating numerous edge cases, many undocumented or known only to tech leads. This required extensive research and the consolidation of details to establish a clear, consistent flow.
Budget constraints limited testing, so most usability insights were gathered through guerrilla testing within the office.
Visual Design
Key screens—Home, Deals, My Points, etc.—were updated to reflect the FeelGood design. I focused heavily on the Deals section, ensuring alignment with global branding while adapting to market needs through guerrilla testing for clarity.
Challenges
Localization was a significant hurdle, as the app supports 30+ languages, sometimes leading to inconsistencies with the global design system.
Digital design, redesigned screens
Design System
I played a crucial role in adapting and structuring the design system to our needs, focusing on accessibility and creating comprehensive component annotations.
Leadership and Collaboration
Recognizing gaps in team communication, I aimed to bridge silos by establishing structured meetings with clear agendas. I organized sessions for cross-functional discussions to identify potential risks early and gather crucial feedback on design solutions. As a team lead, I initiated design retrospectives to gather team feedback and implemented bi-weekly design updates via an open Slack channel to improve transparency and collaboration.
Challenges
The team's long-standing processes made it difficult to adopt a more collaborative approach. Additionally, the lack of clarity on feature ownership complicated meeting logistics.
Process communication scheme before vs after and today
Analytics
A crucial but unaddressed goal was establishing product metrics to focus on data-driven design. After the redesign launch, collaboration between design and analytics teams was prioritized to create actionable insights.
The "Create Account" flow was selected for initial analysis to assess funnel conversion and drop-off rates. Alongside another designer, I conducted user interviews to gather insights, allowing us to formulate hypotheses that were presented to McDonald's stakeholders for approval.
My role involves developing flow proposals, gathering data, generating hypotheses, collecting user feedback, creating solutions, conducting A/B tests, and evaluating outcomes.
Challenges
The team's long-standing processes made it difficult to adopt a more collaborative approach. Additionally, the lack of clarity on feature ownership complicated meeting logistics.
“
"More than happy with Christina's contribution! She's been great and instrumental in our biggest design project and biggest launch ever. Easy to work with, very organised and very fast with sending any details or screens over when needed. It feels like she's working on literally every GMAL design issue at the same time, which is great."
Kostis Agrafiotis
Director of Product Management at McDonald's