DoorDash Design is more than just design
How four unique disciplines work together to ‘design’ beautiful products
One of the keys to the DoorDash Design team’s success is that we’re more than a team of designers: we also have integrated Design Infrastructure, UX Research, and UX Content Strategy teams working on every project.
In this article, our Head of Design, Helena Seo, shares her thoughts on the value of a multidisciplinary team and why we brought these four unique disciplines together. We also asked the leads of the three teams to describe their roles and how they think about “designing” for users.
We hope it helps other teams find inspiration to improve their own structure and collaborative processes. We also welcome your thoughts on how different functions can work better together, so share any thoughts you have in the comments below!
The value of a multidisciplinary Product Design team
Helena Seo, Head of Design
Many people think that the Design org is synonymous to a team with Product Designers. Surprisingly, in our 60-people (and ever-growing) org, only 2/3 are Product Designers. The rest of our team is composed of Researchers, Content Strategists, Design System Designers, and Design Technologists. It truly takes a village to build and shape great products — a village made up of people with multidisciplinary skills and diverse perspectives.
To use a simplified analogy: if Product Designers are the architects, Researchers inform the team where to build houses strategically. Design Infrastructure members design and engineer the robust building materials. Finally, Content Strategists are the civil engineers who ensure that the city infrastructure is most effectively planned and designed.
At DoorDash, all four disciplines work very closely together day-to-day. Each Product Designer, Researcher, and Content Strategist is embedded in product development, working closely with other cross-functional teams like Product Management, Engineering, and Strategy & Operations. In addition, our Research, Content and Infrastructure teams offer office hours to the design team and cross functional partners for consultation throughout the design process and actively participate in our review sessions to ensure the quality and consistency in our execution.
Below is the description of each team outside of Product Design:
Design Infrastructure
Led by Kathryn Gonzalez
What does Design Infrastructure do at DoorDash?
At a high level, our job is to enable our partners in design, product, and engineering to build our products at a higher-quality, with more consistency and efficiency. We want to build the best foundations that our product designers and engineers can build from so that they can focus on solving the problems specific to their product.
We do this by building our design system, Prism, for our designers and engineers. This means defining & building the tools, the components, and the patterns that solve common design and interface problems so that our partners have to spend less time thinking about nuances of UI design and more time actually building their product.
How does your team “design” for users?
For us, we focus on going to the lowest level of detail — understanding the nuance of our design decisions from the lens of our core visual language, the UI components that make up every single screen, and the broader patterns that our designers and engineers leverage. We strive for quality for our end users (the Consumers, Dashers, Merchants) of our products, as well as for the designers and engineers that use our design system. We design for our teammates, and they in turn design for our users — this means needing to think about the impact of our work through a systematic lens. Every detail, every decision is magnified through its use in the system so we care about the craft and detail of what we do from all angles: visual design, interaction design, accessibility, and technical craftsmanship — it all starts with us.
UX Research
Led by Zach Schendel
What does UX research do at DoorDash?
We work directly with all three of our audiences to uncover needs that can inspire innovation. We partner with Product Management, Design, Strategy & Operations, and other orgs, to help ground innovation roadmaps in the pain points of Customers, Dashers, and Merchants. One of DoorDash’s core values is being customer obsessed, and that value is represented in the research that marketing, policy and analytics regularly conduct, but our unique contribution to the pool of insights is our focus on qualitative and quantitative research methods uniquely positioned to shape the product experience.
We strive for balance in our research. We seek answers to both strategic questions — What should our next vertical be? Who am I designing for? — and tactical questions — What’s the best entry point to [x]? Does this make sense? But, either way, impact is our northstar; If the research has a high probability of improving the business, is not redundant, and is aligned with DoorDash’s mission to empower Dashers, Merchants, and Consumers on our platform, then we try to find a way to prioritize it.
How does your team “design” for users?
Depending on the audience the terms may change, but the underlying sentiment remains consistent: everyone, from the CEO on down, is hungry to learn the “user story”, the “product market fit”, or to define the “problem” in a problem brief. The entire point of our team is to be the voice of those who will engage, or already are engaged with our products. We illuminate the “problems” in the problem brief. We tell the “users story”. And, our partners in Design and Product are right there alongside us, soaking in the inspiration at every step.
UX Content Strategy
Led by Tae K. Kim
What does UX Content Strategy do at DoorDash?
We work with product and design partners to optimize our products for usability early in the product process. Our goal is to try and remove as much copy from our product as possible by solving UX issues up-front. That way, users don’t have to deal with clunky features that come saddled with things like tooltips, modals, banners, and giant chunks of copy. We also establish and manage standards for all of our transactional content. This covers in-app copy, emails, SMS/push, error messages, and the like.
How does your team “design” for users?
We think about how users navigate our products, and try to make everything in our product easy to grok and use so it doesn’t need any explanation. If it does, we’ll try to break the actions down to simpler steps or optimize the UI so they can more intuitively use the feature.
We also think about why they’re using our products, and try to ensure every feature provides genuine value. If we have to ‘sell’ a user or divert their attention to get them to notice something, it’s usually a sign that it isn’t inherently valuable and needs to be rethought.
When it comes to the actual content itself, we strive for clear and concise language so users don’t have to decipher the meaning. We try to be transparent as well, so they never have to question our intent.
Learn more about the design leads featured in this article by reading our DoorDash Design Leadership interview series. You can also find links to open roles on each team by visiting our careers page.
