McDonald’s — Community Playbook & Gamified Learning

The Setup

McDonald’s community managers are the brand’s voice to millions of people, in public and in real time. Most were new to the brand. They learned it from a rulebook PDF hundreds of pages long, and many left before they got good. Each time someone left, what they’d learned about the brand left with them. At Sparks Grove, we were asked to fix two things at once: make the job easier to do well, and make people want to stay long enough to get great at it.

What I Led

I led the experience design from research to final concepts. We shadowed community managers during live shifts, went through escalations they handled well and badly, and mapped where the Rules of Engagement broke down under pressure. I built the system on Self-Determination Theory: people stay engaged when they feel capable, in control and connected. Points, badges and leaderboards would only ever point back to those three needs. From there I designed the two halves: a Digital Playbook to help people do the job today, and a gamified learning system to help them grow.

What We Delivered

Ten connected pieces:

• The Digital Playbook app for phone and tablet.
• A searchable Rules of Engagement library.
• The Decision Tree for escalations.
• A voice and style guide with live examples.
• The gamification model.
• A Learning Portal.
• Leaderboards and badges.
• The Idea Center, where peers vote up the best fixes.
• Program Studio, an admin console for the social team.
• A shared UI kit and rollout plan.

Together they gave a hard, high-visibility job a clear path from new hire to expert.