ASL in the McDonald’s

Drive Thru

How can we make the drive thru a more accessible and inviting experience for Deaf customers while minimizing impact to important service-tracking metrics?

Duration

Oct - Dec 2025

Client

McDonald's

Services

User Research

UX Design

Challenge

Deaf People Hate the Drive Thru

  • They can’t order from the speaker

  • They throw off the sequence of orders

  • Employees are frustrated with them for messing up order metrics

Design Challenge:

How can we make the drive thru a more accessible and inviting experience for Deaf customers while minimizing impact to business metrics?

User Journey

Satisfaction Decreases with Time

Background

Using Aira in the Drive Thru

Aira ASL provides on-demand American Sign Language interpreting services to Deaf customers:

  • 30 interviews measuring sentiment

  • 5 US cities (emphasis on high Deaf population)

  • Assess the efficacy and viability of this drive thru solution

Research

Strategic Approach

Initial Findings

Large Learning Curve

In the first city we tested in

  • The first visit with Aira was worse than the control but,

  • The second visit with Aira was significantly better than the control

How can we improve the first experience to overcome the learning curve?

Constraints

They Can't Hear Me!

Deaf people are so used to skipping the speaker, so many didn’t know where to hold their phone.

Some forgot to disconnect from car bluetooth which impacted interpreter communication.

For many, ASL was their first language, so all instructions should be bilingual.

Designs

Onboarding Improvements

I worked with another UX Designer to:

  • Introduce a tips page for proper use with feedback implemented

  • Redesign the home page to make the McDonald’s partnership clearer

Results

UX Fixes Resolved the Learning Curve

By the fifth city,

  • the first Aira use was rated nearly the same as the second

  • the second Aira visit was rated 20% higher than the control

Impact & Learning

40% Improvement in Satisfaction

Findings were brought to McDonald’s Executives for review at the start of 2026.

We are still waiting on metrics for overall business impact once it has gone to a widespread release.

This project showed me the importance of visually communicating key concepts -

  • Users have different levels of fluency, so designs should be obvious without captioning

From this project, I gained more insight into participant recuitement and got more insight into cross- team and corporation collaboration. Working with a big corporatioin

Future improvement: Test the employee experience and track those metrics to build a better business case for buy-in.