Client
Founded in 1954, Burger King is one of the leaders in the fast food industry, with over 12 thousand restaurants in 75 countries worldwide. Every day, these are visited by 11 million customers.
Project Idea
Updating the app and ensuring highest fail safety possible
Burger King had already had an app. It was much loved by the customers and became one of the key sales channels for the chain.
As the chain expanded, however, the app needed some scaling up and improvement as well. Besides, the chain was facing total re-branding for the first time in 20 years. The new concept involved updating the entire brand identity — from fonts to staff uniforms. Digital sales channels — the website and the mobile app — were no exception.
Burger King decided to update the design of their mobile app as well as improve fail safety and fix a number of bugs. All in all, that’s what they came to Surf with.
One of the deciding factors was that Surf had considerable experience in food tech development.
Challenges
At least 99% fail safety
We have found and fixed the bugs, thanks to which we have managed to hit an all-time high fail safety:
Redesign
Together with a designer from Burger King, we have implemented a new design concept for the brand in the mobile app. Now, Burger King has a sales channel that has a much more modern and stylish design, reflecting the current values of the brand.
The biggest challenge was redesigning the app and developing the features simultaneously. Our team was addressing three crucial tasks at the same time: stabilizing the app, developing features in the old app, and redesigning it.
Solutions
Improved fail safety
For starters, we found out why the app was so fallible.
- On iOS, we found a bug in the 24-hour time format. We’ve made the delivery address available again, and users can now set a 12 or 24-hour time format in their settings. Before that, users couldn’t make orders if they set a 12-hour format. And even if they did get access, the app showed an error saying that delivery wasn’t available and the restaurant was closed. Our developers fixed that bug.
- On iOS and Android, we’ve fixed adding delivery addresses. Before that, users from several cities had trouble adding their addresses with “/” symbols and building numbers.
Having fixed the bugs, we’ve reached ~98% to 99.9% fail safety on iOS and ~98% to 99.04% on Android.
New features
Polling service. Burger King needed to carry out polls and gather user feedback about new items on the menu and service quality. We implemented the polling system using SurveyMonkey, the world leader in online studies.
Tips for couriers. An option much appreciated by both customers and couriers. The former find it a great way to say thanks for quick delivery, even if they have no cash, while the latter get a nice bonus to their wages. We’ve integrated the app with a service that allows you to choose how much you want to tip in percentage points with respect to your purchase.
Call password. Burger King made the decision to expand the number of authorization options, adding call passwords. To use it, customers enter their phone numbers and get an incoming call, where the last four digits of the phone number are the authorization code.
Support chat. Contacting support has become easier still — the app now has a support chat. Whenever the order is taking too long to deliver or doesn’t live up to expectations, users can quickly sort it out with customer support. This feature boosts brand loyalty and helps smooth out the challenging cases.
Delivery type available. When users choose a meal, straight away they can see what type of delivery is available: from delivery aggregators to Burger King’s own service.
User analytics. All user actions in the app can be tracked with analytics. Thanks to that, the client can evaluate the efficiency of this or that option or feature or find out the things users struggle with at various stages throughout the checkout flow.
For example, with the help of the analytics, we’ve discovered that the cost of delivery determines the type of delivery — Burger King’s own service or the aggregators’ — users choose and whether or not they’ll proceed to checkout.
Besides, user data can be used in ad campaigns.
Redesign according to the new brand concept
Burger King has come up with an entirely new visual concept. It goes along the lines of flat design, but it’s distinct in the way it’s brought to life. In it, modern design trends blend in with the elements that pay homage to the vintage 1969-1999 logo. The color scheme — brown, orange, green, and yellow — symbolizes the organic origin of all ingredients used in the menu. It was the same design concept that we implemented in the app.
Burger King changed their brand font as well. The new one made the text much more readable, while the minimalist color scheme tied all the elements together.
Changes in the design brought along changes in positioning and app logic. Alongside the redesign, we’ve introduced some improvements to the UX. For example, it used to take three screens to get authorized. Right now, there’s only one of them.
Result
Burger King is leading in app stores as of 2022.
