Building a UX Organization from 0 to 1
Overview
Year 1
Go To Foods (formerly Focus Brands), owns multiple national restaurant brands such as Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s and Jamba Juice.
Background
A restaurant conglomerate in Atlanta, Georgia, realized they were overpaying for having their digital experiences outsourced to agencies. As a result, they decided to create an in-house digital agency to support their multiple brands. I was brought in as a UX Strategy contractor, the first UX professional at the company. To my surprise, I would be splitting my time between crafting great experiences and communicating (selling) the value of UX to upper management.
After getting the job, I went straight to work:
Met with stakeholders, including the CMO who was the executive sponsor, to define the problem and what “success” of the project would look like to them
Worked closely with Marketing and Customer Insights to determine who the target customers were and their behaviors
Researched and measured the usability the company’s digital assets and their primary competitors assets to create UX benchmarking to measure where we were and our future products
Results:
Understood the underlying problems with the current digital experiences, such as poor sales performance and difficulty painting separate desktop and mobile websites
Solid working relationships with stakeholders built on trust from the beginning of the project
Clear data to share with stakeholders about their current products’ poor performance compared to their competitors - Our key competitors, such as Panera and Chick-Fil-A, had usability scores between 88% - 95%, while Go To Foods hovered between 40%-65%
Converted from contractor to full time employee in less than 3 months
Show Value. Fast.
There was little to no budget and only two people in the entire company knowing what “UX” stood for, I had to constantly show the value of really understating our customers’ behaviors while also crafting our future digital products.
A few actions I took were:
Increasing sales on Moes.com by 31% by moving the “Order Now” CTA from below the fold to the top right corner
Working with our field sales and catering teams understand high-value customers who fell outside the typical marketing research data, such as pharmaceutical reps that consistently made large volume orders
Run 1:1 user interviews immediately outside the CMO’s office so he see and hear what our customers were saying about our different brands
Results:
Employees across the company in different departments brought their great ideas to me
The CMO started coming to UX for data on their customer
Secured budget from each brand to run more user testing
Secured budget for a summer intern for UX
Original Moe’s Website
The main CTA to order food, and drive revenue, was below the fold.
Scaling Processes
With 7 unique restaurant brands and websites to create, we knew we could save time be reusing componenents. With the help of the UX intern, we built a design pattern library in Sketch to reduce our workload by 40%. This time savings allowed us to look for other areas of improvement, such as user research and content management.
Process improvements included:
Utilized both UX employees to run user research sessions and take notes
Ran accessibility audits and training for our entire digital team
Conducted content audits on each website
Results:
Secured funding to hire a full time UX employee
Reduced UXR note taking and analysis by over 70% while increasing the number of questions asked in each session
Found over $100,000 worth of accessibility risks across our websites and mobile apps that we were able to correct
Discovered over 25% of each website’s URL’s were out of date
Secured funding to hire a full time Content Strategist
