Firebirds Restaurants website redesign
THE CHALLENGE
Firebirds needed to redesign their website from the ground up to solve performance issues across search, mobile optimization, load times, and conversions.
The primary goals were to increase reservations, online orders, and loyalty sign-ups. A secondary goal was to grow brand affinity. We needed to support a complete replatforming. We consolidated sites, migrated to Craft CMS, integrated a custom Olo experience, and supported reservations through OpenTable.
ROLE
Lead Visual Designer
PRIMARY SKILLS
UI & Interaction Design
Reusable Pattern Library
WCAG 2.1 AA Compliance
Interactive Prototyping
Stakeholder Management
Style Guide Creation
BARKLEYOKRP WEB TEAM
Steve Swackhammer (User Experience and Development)
Jason Head (Development)
Morgan Avrigean (Strategy)
Plus many more who deserve a massive amount of gratitude!
The homepage showcased the physical aspects of the restaurant. It highlighted features like wood grain and stone textures, bringing the in-person experience to the digital space.
THE INSIGHT
The experience had to work especially hard on mobile.
Discovery showed that more than 75% of Firebirds site traffic came from mobile. This meant that speed, clarity, and efficient task completion were critical for reservations, ordering, and loyalty conversion. Slow load times were tied to location-specific menu pages having a high volume of content, so holistic content optimization was an essential part of the process. For the visual language, a deep dive into the competitive landscape reinforced our intended design approach: avoid clutter and let the food do the talking.
My design approach is deeply rooted in Atomic Design. After discovery, the first design artifact created for Firebirds was a library of foundational building blocks. It included color, iconography, typography scale, inputs, selectors, buttons, and more. For Firebirds, the goal was to create a consistent integration of the in-person experience through every aspect of the UI.
These foundational building blocks come together to form components for specific content types. For Firebirds, this library has many flexible and custom components. To back the digital strategy, many components emphasized pathways to ordering and signing up for the loyalty program.
The team created a bunch of page templates to balance flexibility and cohesion for the many locations they had to serve. They included a flexible Location Detail template to tell each location’s unique story and showcase their robust menu offerings. They also created templates with greater technical complexity, including a fully custom Olo ordering experience.
THE SOLUTION
The digital design system I led emphasized bold food-forward moments, clear CTA hierarchy, and flexible content patterns that could scale across location pages, menus, promotions, and Olo ordering touchpoints. Paired with Craft CMS, the redesign gave Firebirds a streamlined platform for content management, SEO optimization, accessibility, and performance.
As with all digital experiences I craft, I treated accessibility as a design requirement from the very beginning, not a development afterthought.