McDonald’s needs to improve the restaurant experience and again become a more social destination. With streaming music now playing at most Swedish restaurants and with a revitalized music selection, there was an opportunity to add a digital dimension to each visit and make each visit more fun.
BeatQuiz is a unique and social real-time quiz game about the music you hear at McDonald’s restaurant.
BeatQuiz is seamlessly integrated into McDonald’s smartphone-app and is super easy to play. It is like a pub quiz that is always on - questions about songs, artists, genres and more are pushed to your device every 20s.
BeatQuiz is seamlessly integrated into McDonald’s smartphone-app and is super easy to play. It is like a pub quiz that is always on - questions about songs, artists, genres and more are pushed to your device every 20s.
Behind the scenes, there is a lot of innovative stuff going on. BeatQuiz taps into a data stream about what music is playing at each restaurant, and then generates quiz questions on the fly using music metadata pulled from multiple online sources and bespoke algorithms. BeatQuiz learns new music automatically and is always up to date. Listen play, score points and climb the daily leaderboard - or challenge your mates in a match. BeatQuiz is allways on, but only at McDonald’s restaurants.
The product and service is designed and developed for McDonald's Global with a view to launch on multiple markets as an always on engagement platform - it scales to any market and any music content played through Soundtrack Your Brand / Spotify Business.
”McDonald's Sweden re-invents the pop music quiz.”
Retail-Focus
How it was made
For this project I collaborated closely with the design an development team at ApeGroup as well as McDonald's in Sweden and Chicago, SoundtrackYourBrand and Musikki. Because the idea is based on a tight integration of several technologies and data streams while it also has to be super simple and fun to play, we worked very tightly together, both physically and online with Slack, Trello and Appear. We made several concept iterations and prototyped two different UX and design directions using InVision and built prototype backends in node.js and Java to verify data quality and solutions. In the development sprints, we did weekly demos and tweaking of features, design and animations using Sketch, InVision and Principle. A fully functional proof of concept was launched at SxSW before we got a green light to go for full integration into the McDonald's app and launch on the Swedish market.
As the originator of the idea, I acted as a creative director combined with product ownership, getting involved in all aspects of the product development, including UX, design, technical solution and data.
BeatQuiz was previewed at SxSW 2016
For more about McDonald's BeatQuiz, please visit beatquiz.nu
