2011–2014
Taco Bell: one MyTacoBell portal for the owners and managers who run the restaurants
A Taco Bell restaurant general manager starts a 10-hour shift by signing in, one by one, to five systems from the back office. Owners and managers had separate portals, and publishing a page took 19 steps and 3 days. We rebuilt it with them as one MyTacoBell portal, live in January 2014. April to April, a year apart: 63% more visitors and 2.85× the page views.
- 63%
- more unique visitors, 43k to 70k (April 2014 vs April 2013)
- 2.85×
- page views, 400k to 1.14M (April 2014 vs April 2013)
- 200
- content authors trained, up from 2
Schematic — client UI under NDA
- Client
- Taco Bell
- Industry
- Food & Beverage
- Scope
- Portal strategy · User research · Information architecture · Portal build · Content migration · Author training
- Platform
- IBM WebSphere Portal 8 + Web Content Manager
- Partnership
- 2011–2014
Challenge
On the restaurant visit that shaped the redesign, the day started at 9 a.m. with the shift lead working through a checklist printed on the back of his badge. The restaurant general manager then began his own 10-hour shift, sometimes making tacos beside his crew, and every day signed in separately to email, the portal and three other systems, including the one for hiring. When a PDF opened, there was no way back to the portal. Crew members had no access from home and saw the portal through the manager’s login.
Franchise owners told the same story in roundtables in December 2011, some of them running 14 to 24 restaurants: too many places to go, too many passwords, password resets that took up to 30 minutes, and “too many drill downs”. Behind the screens, Taco Bell ran two separate portals, one for owners and one for restaurant managers, so content was published twice, creating a page took 19 steps and 3 days, and 75% of the portal team’s time went to maintenance (our strategy findings, January 2012).
Approach
Listening first
The portal strategy started with those franchise roundtables. The redesign began in August 2012 with workshops, interviews with every operational role, restaurant visits and personas built around restaurant general managers and owners. The manager and area coach we visited found the navigation in the first mock-ups straightforward, and user focus groups tested the new portal before launch.
One portal, organized by role
The owners’, restaurant managers’, corporate and training sites became one MyTacoBell portal on IBM WebSphere Portal 8 and Web Content Manager, with navigation by role and the platform’s own personalization in place of a custom engine. Owners and managers now go to one place.
Publish once
Authoring templates, workflows and taxonomies let Taco Bell’s business teams publish once to every audience without going through IT. Content authors grew from the original 2 to 200 trained to publish directly in the portal.
How Taco Bell runs its restaurants, in the portal
In 2013 we moved the Answer System, the books that tell team members how Taco Bell runs its restaurants, into the portal as articles tagged to its structure, and added PDFs on demand so managers can still print a job aid for the kitchen.
Forms from the restaurant
In 2014 we added online forms connected to Taco Bell’s systems: restaurant general managers update their store’s hours, in a form shown only from the restaurant, and franchise administrators register restaurant assets.
Impact
The new MyTacoBell portal went live on January 9, 2014. The same month a year apart, April 2013 on the old portal and April 2014 on the new one, unique visitors rose 63% (43k to 70k), visits 61% (175k to 281k) and page views 2.85× (400k to 1.14M), with people viewing 4 pages per visit instead of 2.3.
The portal received two MarCom Platinum awards, in the Website Redesign and Portal categories, and two honorable mentions in Ragan’s PR Daily Awards (2014). We ran the strategy, the redesign and the build, and supported the live portal through mid-2014.