McDonald’s meal ordering mobile application for 65+ markets




The McDonald’s App (GMALite) facilitates mobile ordering, delivery, and offer redemption via in-restaurant code scanning. Operating in approximately 65+ markets. It serves 300M monthly users (≈3M daily), making it one of the most widely used quick service restaurant apps worldwide.

The challenge is to build a highly configurable, market-agnostic platform that supports: local regulations & compliance (tax, privacy, age restrictions), multiple order fulfillment models (delivery, pickup, dine-in), diverse payment methods (from credit cards to local wallets), regional menu variations & languages.

The design has to balance global scalability with local flexibility, ensuring that every customer — from Stockholm to Hanoi — enjoyed a consistent, seamless, and culturally relevant experience.

Client: McDonald’s Global
Company: Umain
Year: 2021–2025
Project: Building configurable and international McDonald’s food ordering mobile app.  

Discovery, Research, Sketching, Ideation, Design system, Visual design, Prototyping, A/B testing, Documentation





Since joining the McDonald’s app project in 2021, I’ve played a key role in modernizing legacy components of the app to align with the new Feel–Good Design brand guidelines. My work includes evolving existing user flows and designing, testing, and delivering new features and screens across the platform. 

A significant part of my contribution has been building, adapting, and scaling the design system to ensure consistency, accessibility, scalability, and support for dark mode across iOS and Android. This work allowed the team to move faster, maintain a unified brand experience, and roll out updates confidently across 65+ markets.

Communicationa and collaboration are the keys. I’ve worked closely with cross-functional teams — including developers, project managers, stakeholders, and fellow designers — refining flows, preparing dev-ready handoffs, presenting solutions to clients, and collaborating daily through Slack and in person. I also partnered with the analytics team to plan A/B tests and uncover opportunities for validation and continuous improvement.

One of the most impactful moments in this journey was contributing to the full redesign of the app. Six months after launch, the results spoke for themselves:


24.6%


Increase offer redemption
Customers redem offers within redesigned flow

20.4%


Increase points burning
Customers purchase with earned points 

1%


Increase account registration
Customers who downloades the redesigned app create account


Working on the McDonald’s app taught me that even the smallest adjustments — from copy to hierarchy to button placement — can have an outsized impact when multiplied by millions of users. It also reinforced my belief that investing early in a robust design system pays dividends downstream, saving time and ensuring brand consistency across markets and platforms.







©2025 updated 11th September by chris-antonovna