McDonald's

Shaping the information architecture and navigation design for a global restaurant data platform.

Role

Experience Design Intern

Timeline

June - Aug 2026

Team

Design Manager, Product Manager, Technical Lead, 2 UX Researchers

Toolkit

Figma, FigJam, Card sorting, Tree testing

🗝️

This project is confidential, reach out to learn more.

OVERVIEW

I designed an information hierarchy to help restaurant managers make faster, more confident decisions.

CONTEXT

The Problem Space

Data on equipment (like faulty ice cream machines), sales, labor, food quality, and customers exists, but it’s fragmented and hard to interpret. While McDonald’s Restaurant Technology design team was cooking up features for a new enterprise mobile and web app, there was no existing framework for how those features should be grouped, connected, or prioritized.

Data on equipment (like faulty ice cream machines), sales, labor, food quality, and customers exists, but it’s fragmented and hard to interpret.

While McDonald’s Restaurant Technology design team was cooking up features for a new enterprise mobile app and website, there was no existing framework for how those features should be grouped, connected, or prioritized.

What I Did

As a design intern on the team, I worked to understand the mental models of our target user, the restaurant manager, to design a navigation structure that felt intuitive and matched how they already worked.

Traffic congestion at the ordering counter.

Conducted card sorting and tree testing with managers and operations team members.

Participated in meetings & workshops across adjacent teams to understand the broader product context.

Explored new tools, including Figma's AI Agent, dScout, UserTesting, and Lottielab.

Explored new tools, including Figma's AI Agent, dScout, UserTesting, and Lottielab.

Participated in meetings & workshops across adjacent teams to understand the broader product context.

Presented my final work to my team, the broader Experience Design team, and many others who I learned from along the way!

What I Learned

The data space itself was new to me, so I had to build domain understanding quickly, on top of navigating product priorities that shifted constantly throughout the summer. I learned to make progress despite uncertainty, ask clarifying questions often, and to anticipate stakeholder priorities and potential features, designing a navigation structure flexible enough to absorb new information and scale with the product.

The data space itself was new to me, so I had to build domain understanding quickly, on top of navigating product priorities that shifted constantly throughout the summer.

I learned to make progress despite uncertainty, ask clarifying questions often, and to anticipate stakeholder priorities and potential features, designing a navigation structure flexible enough to absorb new information and scale with the product.

Outside the Office

Visited McDonald's "burger bun factory" with the intern cohort

Baked banana bread for the office bake sale

Volunteered at the Greater Chicago Food Depository

Happy Meals with my team

Baked banana bread for the office bake sale

Volunteered at the Greater Chicago Food Depository

Chicago being new to me, I also spent a lot of time exploring the city. I played around with Claude Code to vibe code an interactive journal map of everywhere I wandered that summer. Check it out here!

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