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McDonald’s Canada — Find Your Favourites AR

A bilingual, browser-based AR game that drove app downloads and MyRewards engagement through a 30-second countdown experience.

Role

Digital Experience Producer & AR Experience Designer

creative pitch, AR game design, bilingual UX, app integration strategy, technical lead

Duration

6 months

Tools

8th Wall WebAR, Figma, After Effects

Team

Vincent Mei Creative Director

Alex Shilin AR Developer

Hui Du UI/UX Designer

Product by

In collaboration with

The Challenge

Getting Canadians to download an app without asking them to download an app

McDonald's Canada was launching the MyRewards app and needed to drive downloads at scale. The challenge: asking people to download an app is one of the least effective things you can do in a campaign. Instead, the brief became about creating an experience so compelling that the app download was a natural next step — not the ask. An AR game that put McDonald's items in users' real environments, playable from any phone with no app required, would be the hook.

The game needed to serve a bilingual Canadian audience in English and Canadian French simultaneously, work on any mobile device without an app download, and end with a seamless call-to-action that transitioned players directly to the MyRewards app. The 30-second countdown created urgency and replayability — making a single experience shareable.

Find Your Favourites AR — users interacting with virtual McDonald's items in their real environment

The creative pitch — find hidden rewards scattered in your real space through AR, turning a download campaign into an interactive treasure hunt.

Left: Users reach this experience through Xbox advertisement. A responsive landing page for web and mobile — desktop shows a QR code to continue on phone. Right: The AR experience UX/UI with game mechanics overlay.

Process

When a game is the best ad

AR Game Design

I designed the core game loop: McDonald's menu items appear in the user's real environment via 8th Wall world-tracking AR, and players physically reach and tap to collect them within a 30-second window. The items were chosen from the MyRewards catalog specifically — creating a connection between the game and the app's actual reward offerings. The physical interaction model (reach, tap, grab) made the game feel genuinely playful rather than screen-tap casual.

Bilingual UX Design

Canada’s French-language requirement was not an afterthought — it was a design system consideration from day one. I designed the language toggle to appear at the entry point and persist throughout the entire experience. Every in-game instruction, countdown message, CTA, and error state was localized in Canadian French with native speaker review. The two language versions shared the same component architecture to minimize maintenance divergence.

App Integration Strategy

The game's purpose was to drive app downloads, so the handoff from game to app was the most strategically important moment. Rather than a banner ad-style CTA at the end, I designed a narrative transition: your game score translates to a MyRewards points preview, showing what you'd earn in the real app. The CTA became a reward reveal, not an advertisement.

Platform & Access Design

App-free WebAR was non-negotiable for the Canadian campaign scale. A QR code on any print, digital, or social asset linked directly to the game in the browser. I also designed a desktop fallback experience with a QR code handoff, ensuring users who discovered the campaign on desktop could transition to mobile play without losing context.

After the experience, a guided transition leads users to download the new McDonald's MyRewards app — the conversion moment disguised as a reward reveal.

Left: Dropping the red ball activates 8th Wall's SLAM environment scanning. Right: A timed counter to catch all the hidden rewards before the 30-second clock runs out.

Key Decisions

The campaign that earned attention instead of demanding it

Game Design 01

30-second countdown as engagement mechanic

A time-limited game creates the right kind of tension: enough urgency to focus attention, short enough to be replayed and shared. I designed the 30-second format specifically to be social — players naturally wanted to beat their score and share their result. Shareability amplified campaign reach organically beyond paid media.

Conversion Design 02

Score-to-rewards as the app download trigger

The pivot from “download our app” to “see what you just earned” reframed the app download as a reward, not a request. This conversion framing is more effective because it maintains the emotional arc of the game through to the final CTA, rather than interrupting with an unrelated ask.

Localization 03

Language as a system, not a translation

Bilingual design for Canada requires more than word-for-word translation. French strings are typically 20-30% longer than English equivalents, which affects button sizing, instruction layout, and countdown display. I designed the layout system with language-agnostic containers that expanded gracefully for French without breaking the AR overlay or game UI.

Impact & Results

Play, earn, download

12K

Users engaged with the AR experience across the campaign

80K

AR experience completions — proving the game loop drove repeat engagement

Bilingual

English and Canadian French throughout — full localization including AR overlay

Find Your Favourites launched as the digital centerpiece of McDonald’s Canada’s MyRewards app launch campaign, delivering a fully bilingual, browser-based AR game that drove app downloads through an earned experience rather than a direct ask. The campaign was featured on the 8th Wall platform showcase.

This project taught me that the most effective conversion campaigns hide the conversion. No one plays an AR game because they want to download an app; they play because it’s fun. The design challenge was making the transition from fun to functional feel like the natural continuation of the experience, not a commercial interruption.