DiDi Select | Feature Refinement
PROJECT & TIMELINE
3-month feature refinement project
Launched in May 2020
MY ROLE
Lead Product Designer, Collaborating with:
1 Product Manager, 1 User Researcher, 2 Engineers
MY CONTRIBUTION
User Research
Product design
Interactive Prototyping
Usability Testings
DiDi Select is a community group-buying app that emerged during the pandemic to make grocery shopping safer and more efficient. Local business owners joined the platform to host neighborhood pickup spots, where the local residents orders are placed and delivered daily—helping reduce public exposure while earning extra income through fulfilled orders.
I led the redesign of the Arrival Notification feature, which business owners use to inform customers when their orders are ready for pickup. As order volumes grew, the original tool struggled to keep up. Notifications were delayed or skipped entirely, leading to missed pickups, product spoilage, and rising customer complaints.
OUR USERS
In DiDi Select, local small business owners often served as community group leads. They registered their online stores on the platform, promoted goods to neighbors, coordinated daily order arrivals, and notified customers when their orders were ready for pickup.
By taking on this role, they helped streamline local grocery distribution during the pandemic while also creating a new source of income for themselves.
From receiving order delivery to notifying customers
THE PROBLEM
As the platform’s user base and order volume grew rapidly, business owners began struggling to keep up with sending order arrival notifications to customers.
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RESEARCH
To understand why some business owners were not using the feature, we conducted an online survey within the app and received 149 responses from active users.
Aside from that, I also initiated further interviews with our users onsite, so that we were able to ask questions about their experience with the function while observing their daily activities to gain insights into why the feature was not being used as intended.
"Some of the orders have been sitting here for days, but there's no easy way for me to notify those customers."
With the original feature displaying all pending pickup orders in chronological order with no order dates specified, business owners had a hard time identifying which ones needed extra notifications.
"It feels clunky to use."
1. 38.5% of the users in the survey find it difficult to match physical orders with those in the app, as the current page only displays text-based product information.
2. Users reported that the page took too long to load when receiving a high volume of customers.
"Sometimes I can be too busy to use it."
Based on our observation, we noticed that users often have to assist customers picking up orders while simultaneously checking orders in the app.
This multitasking makes it difficult for them to remember to notify other customers promptly, and it’s easy for that task to be forgotten afterward.
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SOLUTION - STEP 1
To improve clarity and efficiency as order volume grew, I introduced "Unnotified" and "Notified" tabs along with date-based filters to help users quickly focus on relevant orders.
I also replaced plain product text with thumbnail images, giving users stronger visual cues to help them locate specific orders faster. Together, these changes created a clearer visual hierarchy and made it easier to complete batch actions with confidence.
SOLUTION - STEP 2
To simplify the main workflow, I removed item-level checkboxes from the surface level as data showed users rarely unchecked missing items. This indicated a strong preference for faster, order-level actions over detailed item-level control.
To maintain flexibility, I introduced a secondary layer for detailed order control. Users who needed to review or adjust individual items could access a dedicated order details screen to adjust item quantities and send notification to individual customers. This kept the main workflow fast and uncluttered, while still offering granular controls when needed.
IMPACT
Increase in feature usage from 34.89% to 66.59% 3 months after launch.
72% of end customers received timely notifications within 2 days of order arrival.
This project gave me hands-on experience across the full design cycle—from uncovering user pain points through research to refining solutions through iteration. I also worked closely with stakeholders to navigate constraints and align on priorities, here are my key takeaways:
Solutions that work at small volumes often break under pressure—designing with scalability in mind is crucial as systems grow.
Designing for operational efficiency means thinking beyond clean UI—understanding when, where, and how users interact with a feature is key to creating solutions that actually fit into their workflow.
Data showed that when users were on the Arrival Notification page, they preferred quick, order-level actions and paid less attention to item-level details. Extensive item-specific actions has low interaction rates and contributed to a cluttered, overwhelming interface.
Clear information hierarchy and thoughtful prioritization became crucial to reduce cognitive load and help make faster yet more confident decisions—especiallyfor busy, task-oriented users and in high-volume environments .