Wendy’s
Finding The ‘Beef’ In New, More Efficient Ways
Executive Summary
Brand
Wendy’s
Role
Associate Creative Director, Product Design
The Project
As the sole design lead on Wendy's digital ordering squad, I spent a year embedded with the product and engineering teams focused on one mission: make ordering faster. We identified three areas of the experience causing the most friction—Location, Menu, and Checkout—and systematically rebuilt each one.
The result: a 70% reduction in interactions required to complete an order.
The Brief
Wendy's leadership gave us a deceptively simple goal:
“I want to be able to order Wendy’s at a red light.”
That single sentence became our north star. It meant the app couldn't just be functional—it had to be fast. Every tap, every screen, every decision point was now measured against that standard. Could someone complete this before the light turned green?
The Stakes
The QSR industry's value wars have made convenience as important as price. Customers aren't just comparing burgers—they're comparing how quickly they can get one. Wendy's was losing that race. Competitors had leaner, faster ordering flows, and Wendy's app felt sluggish by comparison.
The data confirmed it: too many taps, too many screens, too much friction. Users who wanted a combo meal were fighting through a process that felt designed for complexity rather than speed.
Research & The Loyalist Problem
We conducted user interviews, analyzed session recordings, and dug into analytics to pinpoint where the experience broke down. The friction points were clear—but we encountered an unexpected obstacle.
A significant portion of feedback insisted the app was fine. Nothing needed to change.
We called these users "loyalists." They'd adapted to the app's quirks, built muscle memory around its inefficiencies, and confused familiarity with quality. They weren't seeing the problems because they'd learned to work around them.
Here's where it got complicated: one of our key stakeholders fell into this camp. He'd been responsible for the original build and saw proposed changes as implicit criticism of his work. What we framed as improvement, he experienced as threat.
This dynamic shaped the entire engagement. The design challenges were solvable. The stakeholder challenge required a different playbook.
Three Pockets of Change
We broke the work into three focus areas, each targeting a specific phase of the ordering journey:
Location
Problem: Getting from the home screen into the menu took too many decisions. Users had to manually select location, confirm pickup method, and navigate multiple screens before seeing a single menu item.
Solution: We implemented defaulting logic that anticipated user intent. Returning users were dropped directly into the menu based on their most recent preferences. New users got a streamlined setup flow.
Impact: Removed five taps from the experience before users even started ordering.
Menu
Problem: Building a combo was tedious. Item selection, customization, and confirmation required excessive interactions. Each modification felt like its own mini-journey.
Solution: We simplified the entire item-building flow. Customization options were consolidated, default configurations were smarter, and the path from "I want this" to "it's in my bag" was dramatically shortened.
Impact: Users could build and add a fully customized combo in a fraction of the previous interactions.
Checkout
Problem: The bag screen was overloaded. Order summary, modifications, payment information, pickup details—everything was crammed into a single scrolling screen. Users missed errors, got confused, and abandoned orders.
Solution: We split checkout into two distinct screens. The first focused purely on order verification—"Is this what you want?" The second handled payment and pickup logistics. Each screen had one job.
Impact: Clearer flow, fewer errors, faster completion.
Navigating Resistance
The stakeholder dynamic I mentioned earlier required careful management. Direct confrontation would have created gridlock. Instead, I focused on building trust with the Director of Product, who held final decision-making authority.
That relationship became essential. When resistance emerged, I had an advocate who understood the strategic rationale and could help move decisions forward. I wasn't going around the difficult stakeholder—I was ensuring the work had executive support when friction arose.
Over time, even the resistant stakeholder came around. Seeing user feedback and performance data made the case more effectively than any presentation could. The work spoke for itself.
Engineering Partnership
Our development partner was an offshore team spanning multiple time zones. Early on, collaboration felt transactional—specs handed off, questions answered asynchronously, minimal rapport.
I made a deliberate effort to change that. I invested time building individual relationships with developers, understanding their constraints, and creating space for genuine dialogue. Over time, trust developed. They stopped treating our designs as mandates and started engaging as partners who wanted the same outcome.
That trust paid dividends. When technical constraints emerged, we solved them collaboratively rather than adversarially. When scope needed adjustment, conversations were productive rather than defensive.
The engagement also coincided with a platform migration to Flutter, which enabled us to implement a proper design system. This wasn't just a technical upgrade—it gave us the foundation to move faster and maintain consistency as the product evolved.
Outcomes
Interaction Reduction The previous ordering flow required 30+ taps to complete an order. After our changes, users could complete an entire order in under 10 taps. That's a 70% reduction in friction—and it meant the "red light" goal was actually achievable.
User Validation The most rewarding signal came from the App Store. We started seeing reviews that specifically mentioned features we'd championed—users calling out improvements we'd fought for. They didn't know we existed, but they noticed the difference.
Stakeholder Alignment The Director of Product became a genuine advocate for user-centered design, not just a sponsor. The working relationship we built extended beyond this project and influenced how the organization approached product decisions.
Legacy
I rolled off the project in early 2025, but the foundation I built remains:
Design System The component library and patterns I established continue to guide the team's work. New features build on the system rather than reinventing solutions.
Team Capability The designers I worked alongside stepped directly into leadership of ongoing initiatives. The transition was seamless because we'd built shared understanding throughout the engagement.
Relationships The bonds I formed with stakeholders, developers, and cross-functional partners outlasted my involvement. Some of that came from the work itself—but a lot of it came from simply being someone people enjoyed working with. Shooting the shit matters.
Reflection
This project reinforced something I've come to believe strongly: the hardest problems in product design aren't design problems. They're people problems.
The solutions we shipped—defaulting logic, streamlined customization, split checkout—weren't technically revolutionary. They were obvious improvements that required navigating organizational resistance, building trust across time zones, and convincing stakeholders to let go of past decisions.
The 70% reduction in taps is the headline. The real work was creating the conditions that made those changes possible.