Steven @ Didi

Hey, my name’s Steven, and I am a rising senior in the communication track. This summer, I interned at DiDi in Beijing. Didi is the leading company of the ride sharing service in China; in other words, it’s the Uber of China.
I decided to intern at Didi because I was curious about it. It currently has over 600 million registered users (that’s 84% of entire internet user population in China) and I wondered how it’d feel to design like to design for a massive population. Moreover, it offers a service design internship. Having just taken a bit of Molly’s service design class, I couldn’t wait to put some of my skills to use. Lastly, I’d known designer who offered me the internship opportunity would be the right coach for me.



For the 10 weeks of my internship, I had the great fortune in participating in the following projects:
- improving on-boarding process for Didi driver app
- Creating new rating policy and experience for Didi passenger app
- Presenting on CMU HCI’s User Centered Design methods
- Designing a new customer service home page for Didi’s passenger app
- Exploring the potential of artificial intelligence-aided transportation user experience

Each project was exciting and a new challenge for me. However, the most valuable lesson I took away from my internship was not from the projects, but from conversations I had with designers around me, and I would love to share with you the most interesting topic we talked about:
Invisible forces that drive the user experience and interface design of Chinese apps
One day I walked up to my mentor and asked her why are most digital products in China so dense with information, services and functions. After talking to her, I roughly concluded it into three factors that are beyond the control of design.


(these are some of the current transportation offerings of Didi, from the top left to bottom right are
- Taxi
- Premium limo
- Limo
- Private taxi
- Designated driver
- Hitchhike
- Car pool
- Public transit
- Rental
- Taxi for elderly
- Biking
Some more are not shown on this page, and I do wonder, why do we need to cram all of these into a single app?)
Number of Internet users
The huge number of Internet users encourages Chinese companies to provide more services/functions to its users. China currently has 710 million Internet users (US currently has 286 million users), and the user composition is quite complex: the gaps between user segments’ income, culture, living environments are huge. Chinese companies have to provide more functions/services to satisfy more people’s needs. Take Didi as an example, when the ride sharing company started, it only provided taxi hailing service to its users. As it grows, it starts to develop and provide more services to try to satisfy everyone’s transportation needs: biking, public transit, designated driver, taxi hailing for the elderly, premium limo, etc. More than 13 transportation services Didi currently provide serve more than 600 million people, and it’s expected to provide more than 20 services in the future.
A competitive market
China’s competitive market encourages Chinese companies to expand horizontally. The massive user population in China produces countless market segments, each of which contains huge traffic and great business opportunities. As a result, every Internet company wants to take dominant positions in these markets. Therefore, there is strong incentive for companies to constantly adapt its products to serve all user segments and to consider exhaustive use scenarios. Subsequently, a product that was rooted in one market begins to expand to other markets. For example, Wechat, a social platform similar to Facebook, after taking over the social market in China, expanded to include third party digital payment service three years ago. WeChat originally planned, they saw use scenarios, sending and receiving money, Now, you can use wechat enabled it to pay for your rents, electricity bills, further expanding its user segments and use scenarios. DiDi also follows a similar path, after securing its place in the ride sharing market, quickly moves to non-transportation related markets.

The low cost of labor:
The low cost of labor in China encourages content creation. It is relatively cheaper to hire designers, copy writers, business operation analysts, developers and every role related to creating the content on the site. The circumstance enables Internet companies to quickly produce a lot of content to keep their users actively engaged. This is especially the case in e-commerce market: the content of many e-commerce sites in China are updated by hours. The content creation frequency would be less economical if the labor cost is even slightly higher.
