McDonald’s website internationalization
(04)
Overview
I supported McDonald’s website relaunch and international unification by building a scalable UI kit and prototype system that enabled consistent rollouts across markets—within the constraints of a heavily customized AEM CMS and extreme global traffic peaks.
Year
2019
For
McDonald’s
Project overview
During my internship at Ray Sono (digital lead agency), I contributed to McDonald’s website relaunch and international unification effort.
Goal: create one consistent global look-and-feel and improve design-to-development handover for a multi-market rollout—while ensuring the experience can handle major campaign traffic peaks.
To get there, I produced a scalable UI library, high-fidelity layouts, and interactive prototypes that helped align stakeholders and guide implementation in a heavily customized Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) setup. The German website served as the baseline for international rollout.
Key requirements:
• Build a unified, flexible component system aligned with McDonald’s new Corporate Identity (CI).
• Support extreme peak traffic during global campaigns (up to ~80M users during peak times).
• Provide robust handoff assets and interactive prototypes for implementation in a customized AEM CMS.
• Use the German site as the baseline reference for international rollout.
Design elements:
• Reusable UI kit with multiple high-fidelity layout variations.
• Production-ready image assets (compositing, retouching, cropping) for teasers and headers.
• Interactive Adobe XD prototypes used for workshops and validation.
• PSD templates prepared in required formats to align cross-functional teams.
Execution highlights:
• Designed landing pages, microsites, and prototypes based on the new style guide.
• Built an initial modular UI library and surfaced AEM limitations early (e.g., missing support for split 50/50 layouts in the first build), enabling better design–engineering coordination.
• Facilitated workshops at McDonald’s Germany HQ and presented the UI kit and rollout approach to senior stakeholders (up to the international CTO level).
• Supported sitemapping and content structuring for the German site as rollout baseline.
• Introduced Adobe XD as the core layout/prototyping tool—later influencing the agency tool stack for other large clients.
What I learned:
• At global scale, consistency is a product feature: reusable modules + documentation beat heroic design.
• Platform constraints shape the real roadmap: the best design system fails if the CMS can’t express key layouts.
• Stakeholder alignment is its own deliverable: executives and multi-market teams need a clear narrative, not just screens.
My role:
During my internship at Ray Sono, I contributed to key design workstreams for McDonald’s digital presence, supporting the creation of a structured UI kit, interactive prototypes, and reusable templates aligned with the global corporate identity. I helped translate brand and business requirements into concrete design artifacts, supported workshops, and collaborated closely with the team to prepare clear handoff materials for AEM-based implementation. This role gave me early exposure to enterprise-scale processes, cross-team coordination, and the importance of consistency and governance when working on complex, high-traffic digital platforms.