Redesign the mobile experience of DashPass for students

Problem Statement Description

Product context: DoorDash is a local commerce and delivery platform; its products include restaurant delivery, DashPass, grocery and retail delivery, merchant tools, and dasher tools.

DoorDash wants to rethink the mobile experience for DashPass specifically for students. Students may have different routines, budgets, ordering occasions, living situations, and decision criteria than typical subscribers: they may order around class schedules, late-night study sessions, group meals, campus events, limited kitchens, shared housing, or tight monthly budgets. The current DashPass experience may not make the value of membership clear enough for this segment or may not fit how students discover, compare, and justify recurring subscriptions.

Your task is to redesign the student-facing DashPass mobile experience within the DoorDash app. Focus on the end-to-end user journey: how a student becomes aware of DashPass, understands eligibility and value, signs up, uses benefits repeatedly, manages the subscription, and decides whether to continue. Consider how the experience should work across food delivery, pickup, grocery, convenience, and other local commerce use cases relevant to student life.

The redesign should account for DoorDash’s marketplace constraints. A better student experience should create customer value without ignoring merchant outcomes, dasher reliability, delivery economics, fraud risk, and subscription profitability. You do not need to design visual screens in detail, but you should clearly define the user problems, product experience, key flows, and trade-offs.

The experience should consider:

- Student segments such as undergraduates, graduate students, commuters, students living on campus, and students in apartments or shared housing

- Moments of need, including late-night food, budget meals, groceries, group orders, exam periods, campus events, and recurring weekly routines

- Discovery and education of DashPass value, including how students understand savings, eligible merchants, delivery fees, and non-restaurant benefits

- Student verification, pricing, eligibility, renewal, and subscription management without creating unnecessary friction

- Mobile workflow friction across browsing, cart building, checkout, reordering, pickup versus delivery, and group coordination

- Marketplace health, including restaurant participation, merchant ROI, dasher availability, delivery reliability, and order batching or peak-time constraints

- Competitive expectations shaped by other student memberships, delivery apps, retail subscriptions, and campus-specific services

- Success signals and guardrails, such as adoption, repeat usage, retention, order frequency, customer satisfaction, support contacts, and unit economics

The goal is to define a student-centered DashPass mobile experience that makes membership easier to understand, more relevant to student routines, and valuable enough to drive sustained use, while remaining viable for DoorDash’s broader marketplace.