September 13, 2021 · 15min read

Cheat code for the munchies

DashPass for Students

The DashPass Student Plan was a volume growth effort to offer price-sensitive students the same benefits as all DashPass members enjoy for (wait for it)…half the price!

What’s a DashPass?

DashPass is a subscription service at DoorDash that provides customers with $0 delivery fees and reduced service fees on eligible orders from various restaurants, grocery stores, and more. Members also have access to exclusive offers and discounts. The brand promise is that you’ll cover the cost of the monthly subscription after a few orders. With the Student Plan, it paid for itself in a single order.

Students love delivery, not the fees

Months before I started at DoorDash, the research team was already investigating potential targeted demographics to focus on in order to maximize overall growth—families, students, service members, first responders, etc.

This initial market research revealed a significant opportunity in the college and university market. With 20M students across 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities, they represented an estimated $30B+ market opportunity with around 1.7B meals eaten annually. This untapped market already had a food delivery habit—over 70% order delivery about once a week with 27% spending over $100 each week. I mean, microwaved Hot Pockets® and instant ramen with hot water from the bathroom sink tap can only take you so far, am I right?

20,000,000 students attending
4,000 colleges & universities, eating
1,700,000,000 meals/year, spending
$30,000,000,000 😳

Students had a lot of unique consumer behaviors. For example, late-night ordering during puff-puff-pass, I mean “study sessions”—65% of students order between 9:00–10:00 PM and 19% after 11:00 PM. Then there’s the midterms and finals spike where 71% of students tend to order food delivery. Many students don’t have cars, which also enabled more food delivery scenarios.

While the demand was strong with students, brand loyalty was not. The overall factor in choosing one delivery service over the other was without a doubt the fees. So students tended to hop from one service to the next depending on which one had the lowest overall price.

Digging deeper on pricing

At the time, “GrubHub+ Student” was the only plan for students available, priced at $9.99/mo., which was the same as a regular DashPass plan. Later, they bundled with Amazon Prime Student at $7.49/mo. We looked at other student programs: Apple Music, Spotify/Hulu/Showtime, etc. Most of these offers we’re a clean 50% off of the regular price.

With regards to pricing, halfway through this project my team worked on a seperate experiment where we tested billing cadence, monthly vs. annual, for all DashPass memberships (nothing to do with students). We optimized both the UI and the triggering mechanism to strategically show monthly vs. annual savings. This came in handy towards the final execution of the Student Plan work—more on that later.

My role

At this point, I’d been at the company for a few weeks. I joined the Growth pod within the Consumer Experience team. My primary directive was to lead design for DashPass. I spent my initial few weeks learning about company workflows, meeting key partners, and getting a feel for the design language through the design system team and resources.

User flows: from crappy to happy paths

The initial meeting with my Product counterpart, I was asked to provide the team with a preliminary user flow visualization. We were engaged with a third-party service, SheerID, to provide a secure verification process. Unfortunately, the deal wasn’t signed yet and I didn’t have any resources from their side. The verification process was the critical part of the experience as we needed to ensure minimal friction while avoiding fraud.

I ended up going to their site to see other clients they partnered with and ran through their verification processes as best I could. It was a clunky exercise and I wasn’t able to fully verify my student status as I didn’t have student credentials (not for a long time!).

User flow (Initial draft)

In a few days the Product Manager pinged me asking if I’d finished the user flow—there was a meeting in an hour. Yikes! I hobbled together screenshots from Spotify’s usage using this service. I immediately shared it with him and he said it was fine. Wanting to make a strong first impression, it hurt my ego to share something as ugly as this, but I was relieved it would serve a purpose and not hold up anyone. And hopefully my resourcefulness would eclipse my professional vanity.

Sooner than later, I was able to gain insight from the Sheer ID team and clean up the interaction.

User flow (Final)

Design explorations

At this point, I scoured the Design System and Brand resources for patterns and assets in order to build out the necessary pages from the flow document above. The system was well-organized, with a wealth of assets to choose from. When you move fast, these things will make or break you.

I began sketching the mobile experience—it was obviously where we had the most customer engagement, but also represented the canvas with the most constraint. And really, the uniformity between Android and iOS apps, mobile web, and the desktop variants was fairly close.

Initial mobile sketches (clockwise from upper left): 1. Landing page (also represented various other entry points); 2. Filling out the form; 3. Processing the verification; 4. Successful verification; 5. Select billing cycle (monthly or annual); 6. Welcome to DashPass

Wait…what about process?

Most organizations have some version of the Design Council’s Double Diamond design and innovation process. However, each company or organizational group has their own take on the details. Typically, those details are a reflection of how the organization is structured and/or management styles.

At DoorDash, a lead designer was responsible for working directly with a number of stakeholders across several disciplines. While Product and Engineering remain the core partners, there’s also Legal, Marketing, Strategy, Operations, P.R., Brand, Media, Support, etc. Don’t get me wrong, you won’t need to talk to an in-house lawyer for every project. But if the need is there, you had direct access to that resource. In any case, here’s the process we followed:

DoorDash: New feature design process (2021)

Trying something new

Anticipating a lot of screens, several platforms, and a dynamic user flow, I wanted to minimize shuffling through tons of different working documents, so I developed both app/mobile and desktop versions into the actual userflow. This ended up being really helpful for me and all my partners to get a better feel of what our users were going through, as well as keep an eye on how unified the experiences were from one platform to the next.

The Figma file was the single “Source-of-truth” or Plan of Record (POR)—depending on which flavor of jargon suits your taste. When the time came to get feedback from all the partners, this was the file everybody was intimately aware of.

You won’t be able to read all the details but hopefully you can get an idea of how valuable a centralized asset can be in a situation like this. Here’s a screenshot from the Figma file.

Full CX for DashPass for Students (Figma screenshot)

The green line on top represents the "happy path"
The red line below it was the validation process, handed off to the third-party vendor
The light red background rectangle represents the error correction, including the document upload via the user’s camera
At the very bottom shows the integration of e-mail messaging from the CRM team

Time to refine

In my mind, many things were coming together. I had already met with the Design Systems team to assure I was using the correct patterns, I’d shared with my design team several times, etc. The interaction was as short-n-sweet as possible, the information design was clean, on point. I still needed to meet with the Content Strategy and Marketing teams to refine the copy, much of which I wrote. As much as I’d love to consider myself a proper writer, a professional copywriter I am not. I anticipated these copywriters would miraculously massage my draft copy into marketing gold.

What actually happened was my colleague in Content Strategy found an edge case that I had missed.

✓ Partner plan intercept

We had an existing co-branded deal with select JPMorgan Chase & Co. credit cards which offered members a free DashPass membership. If a student used one of these cards through our verification process, they would go from getting something for free to being billed at the student rate. So, we plugged this hole by having an intercept screen which made student cardholders aware of this.

Intercept screen for students with existing Partner credit card.

✓ Clarity in brand voice

Another refinement from this team was the clarification of whose voice was communicating with the customer. For example, from the entrypoint to the third-party verification process, it was DoorDash speaking with the customer. However, if there were errors during the process, it needed to be clear that SheerID was handling this portion of the experience. Once the verification was successful and complete, the DoorDash brand voice would resume.

Sneak peek at Marketing Creative

After the Content worksessions, I shared the updated progress with Marketing & Brand. Those teams had been busy working with Dutch powerhouse SuperHeroes—not the same company that manages MANRAMP, that’s Superheroes Management. 🤘

I asked for a meeting with the Brand team to see if there were some possible points of conversion from their creative into the product, or vice versa. I had a whole (or at least half) career prior to product design as a graphic designer—any chance I got to talk shop with like-minded creatives was a good time. My first take was how fresh the campaign was—wow! Check out some of the work SuperHeroes did for DashPass Students. In the spirit of keepin’ it real, the commercials were directed by student director Juliana Piscina with MikeTeevee’s production company. These ended up being really fun spots—here’s one of them:

Aside from the “Pays for itself on one order,” sticker, which was a component that fit into their campaign, there weren’t too many visual elements directly translatable between product and marketing. However, I thought the tagline they came up with was the perfect encapsulation of the brand promise of value: “SO WORTH IT.”

Unifying platforms

It’s no secret that the mobile app experience is the default experience for DoorDash customers. However, we also supported desktop, which included smaller breakpoints typically used on tablets. Though I already had compositions for these, I turned my focus to the nuances of a small to large desktop versions to make sure all of our mobile patterns had appropriate desktop translations. Here’s some of those screens:

Design Review

After about three months of stakeholder worksessions, iterating, refining—all while balancing other projects—I finally presented everything to our senior leadership. This was an opportunity for direct feedback from their perspectives to make sure the feature was in line with the values of the company, that it presented a solid business case, and the experience was up to the product standards.

From what I can recall, it went smoother than I had anticipated. It was my first “big” project design review and I really wanted to cover all the bases. There were a few points of correction, which was helpful. For example, when a student did not get an immediate verification there was a second-level action of uploading either their transcript, class schedule, proof of registration, or tuition receipt. I had captured all of this on a single screen and the Design Director felt like it should be broken up and simplified—which was a good call.

Uploading documents for manual verification: Initial version (left) vs. Final version (right)

Towards the end of the experience, after successful verification and landing on the DashPass homepage, I wanted to have a referral component. We already had this process in the regular product, but unfortunately a student version ended up being out of scope for the initial launch. Similarly, I thought it’d be ideal to have a certain level of campus customization on the homepage. That, too, was off the table at that point in time.

Engineering hand-off

From my perspective the hand-off was fairly seamless. The only work from my end was to mark possible marketing copy which could change in a few areas. Other than that, the document I had been working on since day one served as both a map of interaction as well as the redlines for all platforms.

NOTE: I didn't miss spending 1-2 days making redlines for engineers like I used to at other companies. It seemed old-fashioned at the time, so I guess I was living in the future at DoorDash :)

Testing parties

Once the engineers were in a good spot, they would invite me to these “Testing parties”—their nomelclature, not mine, heh. Each developer would share their screen and walk through their work. I would take screenshots and compare to the Figma POR. I’d measure some things and give feedback. Most of the feedback were very simple visual bugs. If there was something more lingering, I’d work directly with an engineer to resolve the issue.

Sample feedback from Testing Party (Screenshot of Engineering Build in Chrome Inspector vs Design redline)

Experimentation and validation

Before launch, we conducted an A/B test, split evenly between the 3 variants, which ran for a few weeks. We wanted to measure the adoption and GMV incrementality of introducing student plans to non-subscribers, as well as gather preliminary data to improving our student targeting technique.

Control: Standard landing page
Treatment A: Student plan with Annual by default
Treatment B: Student plan with Monthly by default

Billing cycle experiment: Treatment A: Annual (left), Treatment B: Monthly (right)

The experiment successfully validated that a lower-priced student memberships could drive incremental business growth without significantly cannibalizing existing revenue streams. So, from both adoption and retention standpoints, we were good to go. Furthermore, the annual option generated higher incremenatal GMV over the monthy option.

Product launch and implementation

We launched DashPass for Students on April 11, 2022, with:

Full platform support across iOS, Android, and web
Marketing campaign including PR, social media, and on-campus activation events
CRM flows for users who verified but didn’t complete their sign-up process
Support documentation and training

Student landing page (multiple platforms)

Results and impact

Customer (students)

In post-launch user feedback, students appreciated the simplicity of the verification process, despite the occassional friction. The price-point was well-recieved as affordable and valuable. We discovered that word-of-mouth was driving significant adoption across campuses. Some students faced challenges with campus deliveries due to campus security policies and/or navigation issues, which highlighted and area for improvement.

In terms of product quality, having a hybrid verification experience (automatic vs. manual) proved to be a pragmatic approach—minimizing fraud and maximizing successful student verifications. The CRM team handled conversion drop-offs by re-engaging students after they had either not successfully verified the regular way or had successfully verified but not signed up for a student plan.

★★★★★

My DoorDash experience thus far

My overall experience has been amazing. Love how easy it is to get the things I need last minute just delivered to my door. Never had any issues with DoorDash. I’m so glad I’m able to use it.

Pros
I’m a college student, so I was able to get a dash pass for very cheap. It’s so helpful for me because I use DoorDash all the time. I think it’s great they have a cheap option for us college students.

Cons
Sometimes they can’t find a dasher in a certain amount of time. Which is okay. It hasn’t happened to me, but others have told me it’s happened to them. But they always refund the money if they can’t find someone to deliver your things. Which is very thoughtful.

Regan W.
Customer Service Representative
June 22, 2022
via Capterra

★★★★★

Good service

I have been using DoorDash for a few months and I am very satisfied with their service. They have a wide selection of restaurants and cuisines to choose from, and the app is easy to use and navigate. The food is always delivered hot and fresh. Sometimes, the drivers may take a bit longer to pick up the food because they are waiting for more orders from the same restaurant. I also enjoy the student discount for doordash premium.

Carlo
April 21, 2023
via Trustpilot

Business

The student plan significantly contributed to DashPass growth (adoption and retention) and closed the market share gap within the student population.

Within the first month, we acquired ██,000 students, over half chosing paid plans (over the free trial). In three months, we had over ██0,000 sign-ups, which was █% over our projected goal. The plan generated a significant lift on order rate as well as GMV per customer. In the first two weeks, we achieved $███,000 incremental GMV.

Overall, it was celebrated as a successful launch with plenty of opportunities to further serve these hungry, junior citizens.

My reflections

We were able to deliver, pun intended, what we set out to build: a tailored product for price-sensitive students across American college and university campuses. Not only did we slash the price of membership in half, we did so without degrading a single benefit our regular members enjoy.

Our entire product team put a lot of research, design, and engineering effort into reducing as much friction as possible when it came to verifying and onboarding students into this new experience. The company’s tailored design process provided a holistic framework to allow each discipline to contribute their own expertise and see it reflected in the final product. The platform consistency, hybrid verification, and price-point strategy helped immensely in projecting value to our customers.

Once we launched and gathered a bit of data, it felt great to see the fruits of everyone’s labors. Though I had already shipped a few smaller items within DashPass, this was my first big fish.

🎣

Team

Product: Saurabh Basantani, Sudeeptha Jothiprakash Design: Brian Morris Engineering: Manori Thakur, Vijay Jandhyala, Arunava Saha, Eric Cherin, Dhruyv Upadhyay, DIana Malyan, Bonnie Wang, Utku Guleviz Strategy & Operations: Julio Henriquez, Alisa Weiner, Lou Fiore, Max Brandl, Connor Walsh, Katherine Amigo Research: Elsa Ho, Faraz Farzin Content Strategy: Tae Kim Design Systems: Matthew Lew, Joe Jezowski, Camden Asay Marketing: McKinley Stephens, David Jacobs, Hannah Davis Tsumoto, Bryn Harrington Customer Relationship Management: AG Wright Finance: Muiz Ashiqali, Michael Wu Public Relations: Annabel Sandhu Analytics: Tibor Pakozdi Media: Katie Chum Brand: William de Ryk, Gary Williams Support: Michelle Chen, Mario Mazzoni