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McDonalds

Designing McDonald’s Digital Ecosystem at Global Scale

RIDGEHOUSE 1887

McDonalds

CLIENT

SCOPE

Filed

HUGE

Global Digital

Digital Products

End to End Concepts

I led design work across McDonald’s entire service ecosystem, rethinking the customer journey from curbside to counter.

This included:

Drive-Thru Redesigns: Explored adaptive digital menu boards that personalize recommendations by time of day, order history, and traffic flow.
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‍Curbside & Fulfillment Concepts: Prototyped frictionless pickup models (long before they became pandemic survival tools).

Restaurant & Interior Flow: Developed concepts for spatial redesign to optimize dwell time, throughput, and digital ordering habits.
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Future Fulfillment Strategies: Piloted hybrid systems integrating delivery, mobile order, and kiosk into one unified fulfillment framework.

Impact:

These explorations informed McDonald’s global shift toward digital-first service models. They seeded what became the blueprint for Experience of the Future (EOTF), now live in 38,000+ restaurants worldwide.

The Largest In-Restaurant Digital System in the World

The kiosk became the centerpiece of McDonald’s digital revolution, the most widely used in-restaurant ordering system ever deployed.

Global Rollout: Designed the core kiosk interface, now present in 38,000+ restaurants and powering tens of millions of transactions per day.
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Scale & Reach: The McDonald’s kiosk is the largest digital retail system physically deployed in the world, surpassing any other self-order network.
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Accessibility Innovation: Developed proprietary accessibility solutions that replaced costly third-party screen reader software, saving the company millions annually while meeting global compliance.
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Revenue Impact: Crafted upselling flows that increased average order value by 20–30% in key markets—delivering a sustained lift in revenue.
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Adoption & DNA Shift: What began as a pilot became the core operating model worldwide, embedding digital into McDonald’s service DNA.

Impact:

Market analysts and investor reports credited kiosks as a key driver of McDonald’s financial turnaround. Between 2017–2020, the company’s stock price nearly doubled, with kiosks explicitly cited as fueling growth, margin expansion, and digital engagement.

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Unified POS Concept (McOs)

My final work focused on McDos, a conceptual POS system that:

Unified the entire in-restaurant digital experience (kiosk, mobile app, drive-thru, curbside).
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Envisioned an integrated platform where staff and customers operate on a single source of truth.
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Streamlined operations by reducing errors, redundancy, and training overhead.

Impact:

While conceptual, McDos embodied a north star for how digital, physical, and human touchpoints converge into a single, intelligent operating system for QSR.

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Trusted by global brands, studios, and institutions to build what's next.

Ridgehouse was forged from two decades of experience crafting systems, stories, and digital tools for companies like HBO, Adobe, Mars, McDonald’s, and J.P. Morgan. One built for exploring creative technology and building intelligent systems.