Global Restaurant Drives 40% Increase in Digital Membership With Baymard

A global restaurant brand’s digital team uses Baymard's research to inform UX decisions across its app and website.

The context and the challenge

For a global restaurant brand serving a large customer base, the digital ordering experience is an important part of the customer relationship.

Customers order through apps and other digital screens, so the team needs to consider how each interaction can reduce friction and support conversion.

Improvements to the app and website therefore matter both to customers and to the business.

The UX team already knew about issues it wanted to address, but faced some issues:

• Difficulty in providing the issues enough visibility to leadership and explaining why they deserved attention
• Without a shared research foundation, discussions about improvements often depended on individual judgment
• The team needed evidence that could help it justify proposed changes and build support for the work

Why the team adopted Baymard

Establishing an internal UX team within the digital department made access to a UX research platform particularly important.

Baymard already provided audits of the brand's digital experience as part of its research into food delivery and takeout apps and websites. That existing coverage made the recommendation to adopt Baymard’s platform easier to substantiate.

Baymard gave the team several complementary resources:

• A broad catalog of usability research
• Benchmarks of digital experiences
• Practical best-practice UX guidelines
• Annotated design examples

Together, these helped the team explain why user experience issues on the app and website should be fixed.

Research also provided a basis for validating things the team was already doing well, so planning could account for both weaknesses and existing strengths.

Bringing research into everyday design work

The team's day-to-day focus is improving the design of its digital products. It already conducts qualitative and quantitative research, and Baymard adds an external body of usability findings and expert analysis to that work.

The team can draw on this broader research when:

• Considering a design recommendation
• Checking an existing experience
• Looking for established practices to inform a new feature

The team also credited Baymard with deepening its understanding of ecommerce customers. Benchmarks developed through years of expert analysis provided a useful perspective on customer needs and helped connect individual design choices to wider usability principles.

A practical example in the cart

One application involved the quantity picker on the cart page. Using Baymard's guidance, the team changed the component's default presentation so that quantity controls appeared directly on the product cards in the cart.

This was a specific example of how the team translated research into an interface decision within the ordering journey. The research gave the team a concrete best practice to apply, as well as support for explaining why the design should change.

Using benchmarks to understand progress

Benchmark results helped the team assess the current state of its digital experience and see how it compared with competitors. The team could also compare current assessments with earlier ones to understand how its ratings had changed and why.

These views served different purposes: understanding current performance, placing it in a competitive context, and reviewing progress over time.

That combination gave the business a stronger basis for discussing priorities. Findings could inform a roadmap of improvements, while guidelines offered inspiration and practical direction. The team could also use the research to confirm which parts of the experience were already working well.

Over 40% digital membership growth

Since the start of its partnership with Baymard, the brand reported over 40% growth in digital membership through its app.

The team also reported that customers responded positively to improvements in the menu, offers, and overall usability.

A continuing reference for future improvements

The team described Baymard as a dependable baseline for making decisions and reported that it had saved time and money.

As it planned new features, the team expected the research to remain an important reference for UX performance. It used the findings to plan work, validate design choices, and identify opportunities to improve the experience.

The team's recommendation was grounded in a commitment to usability and empathy for customers. For digital teams with those priorities, it saw value in having an established research resource that could support decisions across both existing products and future development.