Company:
McDonald's
Role:
Team Lead, Front-End Designer
Year:
3 months
Context
How might we design moments of togetherness for families visiting McDonald's?
McDonald's, our project sponsor, was looking to build digital touchpoints with their patrons, specifically families with young children (3-12 yr. old). While they have a well-established app and online games for kids, McDonald's was looking for an opportunity to connect deeper with these families, and make their restaurants a place families looked forward to visiting again and again.
Conducting in-person interviews at McDonald's locations and nearby competitors. We used board games as part of the stimuli, to see how children would want to play with their family during a meal
Problem
INSERT
Our conceptual storyboard. We identified 6 key moments of the in-person ordering experience that we could redesign, to build a better family experience at McDonald's. The storyboard, made with generative AI, allowed us to portray our ideal interaction quickly and simply.
Key hi-fidelity screens that would be shown on the ordering kiosk after a Happy Meal was ordered. Patrons opt-in to getting their picture taken, apply a fun theme, and walk away with a momento of their meal together.
Our foamcore kiosk stimuli. We quickly realized that the way users interact with kiosks was different than how they might interact with laptops or TVs. Since our photobooth concept was fundamentally tied to kiosk interactions, we built this to-scale replica, and attached a web camera to the top, to support the interface we had prototyped.
Testing the photobooth prototype with the faux kiosk and proposed interface. We had participants go through the entire ordering experience, asking them to voice their reactions to our idea, and any pain points we needed to resolve.
My team and I presenting our concept to the global Director of Family Marketing.
Solution
The McDonald's Kiosk Photobooth
Quick, integrated, and tangible: that's what our solution needed to be. Families came to McDonald's in a hurry, or they brought their own mealtime habits with them (e.g. playing board games or talking about school). Additionally, we found that a lot of parents did not want their kids to have another excuse to be on a screen during mealtime instead of interacting with their family members.
Then, we noticed that families used mealtimes as an opportunity to get a picture with everyone in one place. What if we paired that up with the resurging trend of photobooths? At the end of an order with a Happy Meal, families would get the option to take a picture together, and to keep it either in physical or digital form. McDonald's kiosks had the computing capacity, and the physical aspect of having your picture printed on your receipt was endearing to users. Additionally, the process only added around a minute to the ordering cycle time.
