Little Caesars – UX Redesign of Fundraising Platform

Challenge

The people running a Little Caesars fundraiser are not e-commerce professionals. They are a booster club treasurer, a band parent, a teacher with a prep period — organising a campaign once, under time pressure, usually on a phone, usually in the evening.

The platform had aged into something that assumed otherwise. Sign-up carried friction that a first-timer read as "I have done something wrong." Calls to action did not say what would happen next. Mobile was an afterthought on a task that is overwhelmingly mobile. And the system gave almost no feedback, so a coordinator who had in fact completed a step had no way to know it — which produces duplicate attempts, support calls, and abandonment.

The constraint was that the backend was not moving. Whatever improved had to improve in the experience layer.

Solution

I worked with product and marketing stakeholders, starting from usability testing on the legacy system rather than from a redesign brief — the friction points needed to be evidence before they could be priorities.

• Two journeys, mapped separately. A first-time coordinator and a returning supporter want opposite things from the same screens — one needs orientation, the other needs to not be slowed down by it. Collapsing them into one "user" is how platforms end up serving neither.
• Interactive Figma prototypes for review and handoff. Stakeholders approve what they can click. So does engineering.
• A/B tests and pilot feedback before the pattern was settled. Interaction and content both went through the same loop rather than content being written to fit a finished design.

Decisions Worth Defending

• Feedback was treated as a feature, not as polish. The single highest-leverage change was telling people what had just happened. Unconfirmed steps generate duplicate submissions and support volume — the cost of silence is not aesthetic.
• Optimised for the first campaign, not the tenth. Most coordinators run one fundraiser ever. Designing for the expert path would have been designing for a user who mostly does not exist.
• The backend stayed where it was. Every improvement had to sit in the experience layer. That is a constraint worth naming, because "we redesigned it" is easy when you also get to rebuild the system underneath, and nobody offered that here.
• The existing design system was respected. Working inside brand guidelines and established patterns rather than around them is what let the work actually ship within a short contract.

Outcome

The redesigned experience moved the behaviour the business cared about.

• Higher completion rates for campaign setup and participant onboarding
• Increased mobile usage and reduced bounce from entry points
• User feedback specifically citing clearer layout and communication
• Better alignment across marketing, development, and product, attributed to the wireframes as a shared reference

Alongside the fundraising platform I worked on the Little Caesars ordering experience and the Detroit Red Wings app, running user testing and feeding findings back into the design team's iterations — including covering a teammate's portfolio during leave without a gap in delivery.

What I took from this one: in a system where the user does the task exactly once, confidence is the conversion mechanic. Not speed, not feature depth — knowing that what you just did worked.