UX, UI
john st.
Partner Agencies - YUM, McKinsey, Wavemaker, YUM, Cognizent, Wavemaker
Creative Lead (YUM) - Danielle Ruggles
Product Owner (YUM) - Ryan Fisher
KFC's digital ordering funnel had meaningful drop-off at several points in the checkout journey, but the causes weren't well understood. Rather than redesigning the experience wholesale, the brief was to identify high-friction moments, form hypotheses, and validate them through rapid A/B testing, with real revenue impact as the success metric.
My job was to translate those hypotheses into testable UI variants quickly enough to keep pace with a 10-test-per-sprint cadence, while coordinating design decisions across a large multi-agency team.
This wasn't a standard client-agency setup. YUM's internal team, McKinsey, and Wavemaker were all at the table, each with different priorities — business metrics, media strategy, and technical constraints. I was the design voice responsible for ensuring that test variants were grounded in actual user behaviour, not just optimization theory.
That meant pushing back when proposed tests didn't have a clear UX rationale, and advocating for changes that might move conversion modestly but build longer-term trust with users.
$1.35M Combined projected annual impact
30 A/B tests across site, CRM + paid media
3 Sprint cycles, 10 tests each
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Running 10 tests per sprint is fast, sometimes too fast to do proper qualitative work upfront. A few of our hypotheses were directionally right but the variants we tested weren't quite the right expression of the idea. I'd push harder now for a brief discovery phase before each sprint to pressure-test hypotheses with at least lightweight user signals before committing to a build. In a multi-agency setup, that also gives the design rationale more credibility in the room.
