Getting framed

McDonald’s mobile ordering experience keeps getting better thanks, in part, to a new framework our developers are using to manage the app’s efficacy.

by Jonathan Kelly, Director, Product Engineering

The Digital Solutions team in McDonald’s US Technology organization oversees customer-facing technology, such as McDonald’s Global Mobile App (GMA), McDelivery®, MyMcDonald’s® Rewards, McDonald’s website, and our back-end microservices in the US market. Our mission is to deliver technology solutions that make our customer experience convenient and delightful, while enabling crew, managers, and owner/operators to run great restaurants.

Part of McDonald’s three growth pillars and offering speed, convenience and ease of use, mobile ordering has become the fastest-growing channel with our customers. From the second half of 2022 to 2023, mobile orders (as a share of all app transactions) grew by 5.8% in the US.

With adoption growing at such a rapid pace, it was clear we had to build on our momentum by delivering a faster, more seamless, and convenient mobile-ordering experience for our digital customers.

To get us started and help guide our development of the new experience, we defined four guiding principles:

1. Focus on speed and convenience.

2. Protect food and beverage quality.

3. Drive crew efficiencies through improved operational procedures.

4. Minimize impact to traditional channels.

And, last year, we launched our new mobile-ordering experience in the US, integrating geofencing technology to streamline the mobile-order process. Geofencing notifies the restaurant when customers are approaching and prompts the crew to start preparing the order. It allows for more efficient and effective restaurant operations.

Following the launch of the new mobile-ordering experience, teams analyzed data, customer feedback, and restaurant systems to measure overall performance. Our restaurants delivered hot, fresh food even quicker, and digital customer satisfaction scores improved. Customer wait times were reduced by 60 seconds for those using curbside and front counter pickup options.

Our team used these results to learn and adjust throughout the journey. One opportunity occurred with measuring the efficacy of geofencing technologies. McDonald’s uses New Relic to help us monitor the performance of our digital products, but in this instance, we found that we had limited observability of background processing, including geofence triggers. To understand if our technology was working the way it is supposed to, we needed to be able to capture events related to the status of an order.

To overcome this challenge, we developed a framework to use on top of New Relic, allowing our teams to add additional observability “over the air” without the need of an eight-week mobile app release cycle. The framework captures data, providing information about each event based on config file settings. This framework is simply observability in nature and did not require mobile app code changes, allowing us to be agile in using it in production and receive results quickly.

To capture order-status events, we cache the geofence trigger and timestamp. The cached events are then published to New Relic once GMA is brought to the foreground. In collaboration with the GMA site reliability engineers, we extended the framework that can be used with iOS and Android devices.

Once we devised a strategy, our development and product management teams expedited deployment of the framework to an environment to validate if the events were properly published to New Relic. Once validated, the team developed internal dashboards to monitor and report on the efficacy of the geofencing technologies.

Digital continues to be a huge growth driver for McDonald’s, and our new mobile-order experience is leading the way.