Saucy! by KFC

Platform
App, Web, Kiosk, Drive-Thru

Role
Senior UX/UI Designer

Timeline
Jul 2024 - Aug 2025

Team
2 Designers, UX Research, Brand Stakeholders, Engineering, Marketing, Loyalty Partner

A bold, sauce-forward restaurant that reimagines KFC’s core offering through customization and flavor exploration. Centered on chicken tenders and an extensive lineup of signature sauces, the experience prioritizes discovery, speed, and digital-first ordering across kiosks, mobile, and drive-thru.

Be Bold. Stay Saucy.

Lost in the Sauce

Not just another quick service restaurant. Saucy is a whole vibe; from discovery to ordering to first bite.

Less Taps

You know your order and so does Saucy. Order in as little as 2 taps.

Thumbstopping Cravability

Bold product images and colors amp up the crave-factor.

Context

Saucy launched as a new brand expression within the KFC ecosystem, requiring a digital experience that felt distinct yet operationally reliable. The challenge was to express Saucy’s vibrant, high-energy visual identity while maintaining usability, accessibility, and performance across multiple ordering environments.

The experience needed to:

  • Feel immediately recognizable as Saucy, not traditional KFC

  • Support fast decision-making in quick-service contexts

  • Scale consistently across platforms with differing constraints

Creative Direction

The project began with translating Saucy’s vibrant brand language into a scalable design system that could be deployed across all digital touchpoints. This foundational system enabled us to maintain Saucy’s bold brand energy without sacrificing usability or clarity.

  • I mapped core brand colors to WCAG-compliant accessibility values and expanded the palette to support light and dark themes.

  • Defined hierarchical typography using a Major Second scale (1.125) for consistency across devices.

  • Established rules for elevation, spacing, icons, and interaction states to ensure a unified look and feel.

Ordering

The ordering flow was designed around speed and confidence, though it was important for it to feel uniquely Saucy.

  • Clear hierarchy to guide users quickly from menu to checkout

  • Large, visually driven menu items to support fast scanning

  • Product detail pages include macro and lifestyle images of food

  • Personalization to reduce future taps

Scaling the Experience

Saucy’s digital experience needed to extend beyond mobile and web into kiosk and drive-thru environments, each with unique constraints around attention, speed, and input methods. Rather than designing one experience and forcing it everywhere, I focused on adapting core patterns to each context

  • Larger touch targets and simplified layouts to support distance-based interaction and glanceability

  • Clear hierarchy and contrast to ensure readability across varied lighting and hardware conditions

  • Shared system foundations (color, typography, components) and interaction patterns to maintain consistency without duplicating effort

DriveThru.jpg
Kiosk.jpg

Learnings

System-first design enables brand scale.
Translating a bold visual identity into a reliable, modular design system ensured consistency across diverse platforms without undermining performance or accessibility.

Cross-platform parity is strategic, not cosmetic.
Thoughtful alignment of patterns across app, web, kiosk, and drive-thru creates trust and reduces friction even when context changes.