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
🗝️
UNDER NDA
This project is confidential. Reach out to learn more, I'd love to walk you through the details of my work.
OVERVIEW
I designed an information hierarchy to help restaurant managers make faster, more confident decisions.
CONTEXT
Managers had the data they needed, just no way to see it all in one place.
Restaurant managers balance dozens of operational priorities each day, from staffing to food quality checks to equipment upkeep. The data they need to manage these responsibilities exists, but it's scattered across multiple systems, making it difficult to build a complete picture of restaurant performance.
McDonald’s Restaurant Technology design team is cooking up a web and mobile app solution to give managers a unified destination for these insights. But there was no established framework for how the platform's growing set of features and information should be organized, connected, or prioritized.
WHAT I DID
Organizing 22 features into a scalable information architecture
As a design intern on the team, rather than jumping to "how do we organize this," I started by asking: how do restaurant managers think about their day? My goal was a structure that felt intuitive to them, which shaped the research, testing, and collaboration that followed:
Conducted a competitive analysis of 8 comparable products.
Facilitated card sorting exercises with 12 restaurant managers.
Presented my final work to my team, the broader Experience Design team, and many others who I learned from along the way!
CONTEXT
What I Learned
Coming in, the restaurant data space itself was new to me, so part of the work was simply building enough domain understanding to design something that would actually make sense to a manager. Alongside that, I was also navigating product priorities that were constantly shifting throughout the summer.
I learned to make progress despite that uncertainty, asking clarifying questions often rather than waiting for things to settle. I also started trying to anticipate where priorities were heading, so the structure I built was flexible enough to absorb new information and scale with the product.
OUTSIDE THE OFFICE
A summer of learning, exploring, and vibe-coding!
Chicago was also new to me, so I 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!
Visited McDonald's "burger bun factory" with the intern cohort
Happy Meals with my team
