Chick-Fil-A One : A crispy mobile app ordering experience

Chick-Fil-A or Popeyes or Shake Shack. The jury is still out on who serves the best chicken sandwich but I am declaring a winner on who has the best mobile app experience. And the champion is Chick-Fil-A.

Our phones are inundated with numerous apps. But you hardly come across one that enhances your experience with the product and impresses you so much that you stop for a minute and appreciate the excellent work done the team who built it. Chick-Fil-A One, the fast food restaurant chain's mobile ordering app did it for me.

Chick-Fil-A is an intriguing company. Started 75 years ago it is still a family owned business, one of the largest restaurant chains in the US, operates more than 2600 locations, generating revenue of more than $10 billion. They have the highest sale per restaurant unit easily beating giants such as McDonalds, Taco Bell and Subway. Oh and they do this while being mandatorily closed on Sundays. Quite a remarkable feat! How do they do it? The answer is a relentless focus on QUALITY. And you will know what I mean if you have been to one of their restaurants and had a delicious meal comprising of the chicken sandwich and waffle cut fries. The same focus on quality also shows in their mobile app.

I am no insider. I don't work for Chic-Fil-A and I have nothing to gain by beating their drums. But I will appreciate a product that shows excellence. Be it a sandwich or a mobile app.

What makes the mobile app delicious?

1. Clean and Intuitive design

The app lets you get to ordering with minimal amount of taps. Every information that you need to make a decision with is clearly presented in front of you. Image, price, nutrition info. Everything clearly visible for the customer.

2. Intelligent use of location data = Fresh crispy fries

Great fast food is hot, freshly made and quick. But how do you ensure all this for your guests who order pick up. Most restaurants prepare your order and leave it on the counter for you to pick up. If you are late then your fries don't go soggy. On their mobile app, you can order pick up from home but the restaurant starts preparing your order only when it detects that you are approaching the restaurant's location. So it smartly uses customer's location to make sure they get the food hot and fast.

3. Remembers user preferences

If technology can enable a business to come across as more accessible and friendly instead of mechanical and programmed then its a win. Especially in the hospitality business. It's super easy to favorite a restaurant location so you can quickly reorder from there next time. The app clearly categorizes your past orders so that you can quickly reorder them with less resistance.

4. Builds relation with your local restaurant

The app let's your local Chic-Fil-A restaurant operator to send you messages and special offers. These are not spam like and I have found them valuable. Like one time I got free delivery that I availed.

I was looking at my order history on the app and I am averaging 4 orders every month of approximately $25 each. That's $100 per month revenue to Chick-Fil-A from me. Honestly, that's too much Chick-Fil-A. But hey, I have an excuse. I was testing (tasting?) their mobile app for this blog post.

9 tips to build a resume that will get you calls from Google, Facebook and Amazon

I have a sweet tooth. Whenever I am at a grocery store, I love to surf the candy aisle. Specifically the shelves with the chocolates. And the selection of chocolates is vast. There are literally hundreds of options. So many brands, flavors, sizes to choose from. But some chocolates would stand out in the crowd. And what makes some stand out amongst the others is the packaging. Out of the hundreds of selections on offer, I pick up only a few to review and amongst them only one gets bought. (Side note: The Endangered Species Chocolate company has a great product packaging and story. Try it out if you haven’t.) If not with chocolates, you would have experienced a similar situation while purchasing something else. Maybe a book, a bottle of wine or a bag of chips. And every time you are looking to discover something new, the first thing that draws you to the product is its packaging. Now, why am I talking about product packaging in a post about building great resumes? Well, if you rea...

Why Product Quality will be the Ultimate Competitive edge in the AI Era

We live in the zeitgeist of artificial intelligence — where software can be built faster and cheaper than ever before. AI has leveled the playing field, turning anyone with an idea into a potential creator. But in a world where speed and cost are no longer the constraints, what will truly separate the winners from the rest? The classic development trade off — good, fast, or cheap — has long forced teams to pick two at the expense of the third. AI is changing this by enabling development that is both fast and cheap. The pressing question becomes: can AI help us achieve software that is also good ? From idea to prototype, AI empowers teams to deliver solutions quickly, affordably, and with surprisingly high quality. Moving from prototype to Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it’s still possible to maintain the trifecta of Good, Fast and Cheap. However, when aiming for production-ready applications, the stakes rise. Reliability, security, maintainability, and scalability beco...

The $460 Million Mistake That Crashed a Wall Street Giant—and What we can learn from it

On the morning of August 1, 2012, Knight Capital - then one of the biggest market maker on Wall Street - deployed new code to its high-speed trading system—but one of eight production servers never got the update. That lone machine started running an old, dormant module called “Power Peg,” flooding the market with errant trades. In just 45 minutes, Knight amassed nearly $7 billion in accidental positions and lost $460 million. It was one of the most expensive software failures in Wall Street history—driven by a rushed deployment, missing checks, legacy code left behind, and no clear plan to roll back. This is the story of how a routine release turned into a company-ending event—and what leaders today can learn from it. Founded in 1995, the Knight Capital Group was the largest market maker in US equities. Knight’s electronic trading group covered more than 19000 securities and it’s high frequency trading algorithms processed a daily trading volume of $20 billions which was 15% of ...

From Code to Customer: Measuring Software Quality Before Release

“When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” - economist Charles Goodhart I feel that every discussion about metrics should mandatorily start with the above word of caution from Goodhart’s law. Metrics should inform decisions, not drive behavior in isolation. Without context, they can easily be gamed or give a false sense of confidence. Alright! With that disclaimer out of the way, lets talk about Quality Metrics for production readiness. What you’ll find here comes from the trenches — lessons from things that worked, things that didn’t, ideas that sounded smart but fell apart at scale, and blind spots I didn’t see until they hit production. I’ve owned software quality across industries like e-commerce, fintech, streaming, and SaaS — in startups, scaleups, and big tech. Your context may vary, but these insights should hit home for most teams shipping software. Why Should We Even Measure Quality? I believe there are three reasons to measure software quali...

Problem solving with this simple framework

All life problems can be solved by asking 3 root questions about the problem at hand. Why? What? and How? In that order. It's a simple framework for problem solving. It does not promise that the answers will come easily but it gives a structure to getting the right answers to the problem. Why? This is the most important question that we most often overlook. This is the question to identify the purpose. Ask, why do you need to solve this problem? It makes you think deeply about something you are about to do. Ask, why does it matter? It forces to evaluate if this is even worth doing? Ask, why should 'I' be the one doing this? You may realize it should be done by someone else. You may need to ask multiple 'Why' questions to get the right answer. But how do you know when you have asked yourself the right 'why'? When the why results in an answer that's motivational, inspirational and full of purpose you know that you have asked the right why. That is the r...

ankur.blog

Search This Blog