New Media Capstone: Sending Care with Chick-fil-A

Client partnership with three Chick-fil-A locations in Athens, Georgia integrates new delivery features with innovative mobile gifting services into the existing Chick-fil-A One app and explores new avenues of exceptional customer service to expand upon their emerging presence on the horizons of food delivery.

Click this link to view our Project Website — exploring this website will reveal a detailed overview of our group’s progress and a behind-the-scenes perspective on how this project came to life!

Sending Care

Spring 2023 — New Media Capstone

Over the course of the Spring 2023 semester, New Media Capstone organized each and every student in the class into individual teams and challenged us with working together on building a unique new media solution to deliver a desirable product for the assigned clients as our final project.

Project Timeline

In the early days of the Spring 2023 semester, our assigned New Media Capstone group quickly transformed into the Sending Care team; one of two groups designated to design and develop the new media idea presented to us by client Shane Todd, owner and operator of three local Chick-fil-A locations in Athens, GA (Beechwood, Barnett Shoals, and Downtown).

(Top Row: Kiyan Kojoori, Jeremi Dickson, Nicolas Bray; Front: Cassidy Moore, Darby Taylor, Paige Alpaugh)

My Role

After a full semester working with my group, I found that the roles I was often most eager to fill for the team were both as the content writer and a graphic designer.

Checkpoint Three: I designed both the 4K Portrait + Square Social Poster in Photoshop, deciding to center the design around an attention-grabbing visual I created with inspiration from graphic design in fast food advertisements. I also accounted for both intended presentation contexts — in-person visual poster (briefly shown on a scrolling TV) vs. a social media post — and adjusted complexity of design for scale accordingly.

I regularly created digital graphics for visuals found throughout our presentation slides and checkpoint deliverables utilizing my skills with tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Canva, and more.

I designed this poster for our Checkpoint Two user research survey, although our response rate was ultimately likely assisted most from circulation via Chick-fil-A’s email services. These methods together succesfully encouraged a wider sample of responses to represent the community all across Athens, Georgia, rather than an overshadowing concentration of purely UGA student responses.

I also conducted extensive user research to help with compiling and presenting user data during the early checkpoints, ahead of the content writing and graphic design work I went on to complete. I feel that this course reminded me how essential it is to establish a strong background of user research prior and understand the historic digital presence of any company or brand before designing anything new. With this in mind, throughout the rest of the semester, I ensured that all my design decisions would best reflect and best respond to the most common frustrations to improve overall customer feedback regarding Chick-fil-A’s independent food delivery service to the best of my ability.

Project Overview

Whether you’re a parent looking for an easy way to send love from home to celebrate your college graduate living miles away, or it’s just one of those days when a holiday or birthday sneaks up and you’ve found yourself empty-handed: think about a time you wished for something thoughtful to help brighten up someone else’s day, for whatever reason, to appear out of thin air. A handcrafted gift personalized and delivered with care, even though you don’t have enough time to go out of your way to multiple stores and create it yourself.

Sending Care introduces the new, hassle-free food delivery service offered exclusively by Chick-fil-A that wants to help you Make it Special by handling all the hard work behind the art of gift giving. After all, what says “I care” more than a yummy Chick-fil-A sandwich accompanied by a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a handwritten note, delivered straight to mom’s door?

By just tapping on the easy new ‘Sending Care’ tab, guests will immediatly see the variety of new gift options available to add to make any meal of the day feel extra special. These care packages even come delivered with customized and exclusive packaging options, to help truly transform the typical Chick-fil-A sandwich meal into a special celebration feast.

FIgma prototype showcasing the integration of Sending Care’s delivery gifting features into the Chick-fil-A One mobile app with a cohesive design that maximizes comfort and ease of navigation for both new and loyal, returning customers.

With the addition of delivery features and gift package add-ons to the Chick-fil-A One app, the possibilities range anywhere from a single flower to an entire meal, introducing an added guarantee for guests to receive the true gift of a Chick-fil-A meal that has already been confirmed and approved entirely according to their personal preferences and food tolerances as adjusted accordingly in the Chick-fil-A One app.

The Challenge

1. This product idea was specifically brought to us concerning our client’s challenges with targeting Chick-fil-A’s recent introduction of delivery services and the delayed success thus far shown by lack of order delivery efficiency per driver’s trip. According to Shane Todd’s belief in max delivery efficiency, why waste an opportunity to take advantage of the extra free space in a Chick-fil-A delivery car?
2. As the semester began drawing to a close, we also received a tricky twist to our product development plan: with just weeks of preparation left until SLAM, both Chick-fil-A New Media Capstone groups were tasked with combining their ideas and designs into one cohesive mega-team. As one may expect, this merger initially produced almost as many challenges as it ultimately did opportunities for positive change later on! At first, consolidating the contributions of almost twice as many individuals into a single design presentation felt impossible.

After comparing various options to present as design choices to the client, I designed a new logo that would begin to emerge more and more throughout Sending Care’s branding.

The Solution

Above all else, Shane Todd emphasized his belief in expressing Chick-fil-A’s sense of ‘care’ alongside his interest in exploring ways to elevate their delivery experience to match the top-rated service already available via drive-thru or sit down visits.

By taking advantage of the existing delivery infrastructure and building off of the Chick-fil-A mobile app, Sending Care’s design helps make these new features easily accessible to Chick-fil-A customers that already know and love how the app works.

The app’s addition of both the mobile delivery and delivery gifting features within the Chick-fil-A One mobile app incorporates both the branding and the infrastructure, inspired by what was made available to us publicly. Our hope was to incorporate Chick-fil-A’s people-first focus on care, in order to design a cohesive set of product variety that will simultaneously increase delivery orders and help bring people together over the gift of delicious food.

In response to a concern raised by Shane Todd regarding the ability to send care to all Chick-fil-A customers, as not all locations offer delivery services and this would leave a vast demographic of customers left out from using any of these new features, Sending Care also introduces sending care with newly designed digital gift cards, fit for every occasion, directly in the Chick-fil-A mobile app.

The Results

SLAM — May 2023

Before I could believe it, it was already the big day: at Spring SLAM, we joined together and presented our final product as one big, happy Sending Care Chick-fil-A mega-team! Although I did not personally participate in the presentation, my team and I worked really hard alongside the other half of our Chick-fil-A group to create a visually attractive display with plenty of activities and as well as informative demonstrations throughout, which I believe was a very well-executed and well-received technique!

I designed the One-Pager that was inspired by our Checkpoint 3 poster design, in order to cohesively integrate our logo and design changes overall as well as creatively capture guest’s attention as they passed by.

As an app offering both mobile gifting features and delivery features on top of the existing food delivery services one already expects to receive, guests are invited to Make It Special with a cohesive gift package, an individual special add-on, or the simple convenience of finding the perfectly themed e-gift card. The aim was ultimately to innovate the Chick-fil-A delivery service, potentially placing the Chick-fil-A mobile app above and beyond with range of guest services being provided versus any traditional food delivery competitors. I think our team collectively went above and beyond to deliver on this standard, and I am incredibly proud to share all the hours of hard work I provided this semester that helped bring Sending Care to life.

Regarding future steps according to our client, at this time we believe there are still discussions in place regarding several or all of the Sending Care team members presenting the Figma prototype and our other final deliverables to receive a corporate opinion from Chick-fil-A. We hope to receive updates regarding this amazing opportunity from Shane Todd in the near future.

It’s our pleasure to offer you a great new way to Share the Love by Sending Care!