DoorDash chat
company
doordash
my role
product design lead
year
2025-2026
timeline
3 months
everything is chat
As part of my role as the design lead for Support, I own the design and direction of the entire chat platform that includes all chat channels across DoorDash and our global brands, Wolt and Deliveroo.
Early on in 2024 I noticed a trend that was happening at DoorDash. With the rapid acceleration of AI, more and more teams at DoorDash were looking to chat as a place to build new experiences for their users.
I quickly recognized that this was a massive opportunity for me and my team to get ahead of these initiatives and innovate on what the chat experience could be from a systems perspective, and how that might scale to a wide variety of new experiences yet to be dreamed up.
build a new chat design system
I was able to facilitate a close partnership with our design systems team, Prism, to build a completely new chat design system for all chat channels across our global brands.
This new system aimed to standardize, elevate and unlock entirely new and innovative experiences that reimagined how chat can serve our users.
We were able to align on four key principles for this new chat design system. The system needed to be:
Reliable
Dynamic
Alive
Delightful
revitalizing the chat ui
I worked with the team to craft a clear strategy for this new design system with three clear milestones.
The focus of M1 was to revitalize the core chat UI and create a solid foundation for new innovative experiences.
We conducted deep audits of our own chat experiences at DoorDash, Wolt and Deliveroo, as well as other competitive apps to align on a fresh new take of foundational chat components such as headers, chat message bubbles, the message composer, and specific details around motion, interaction design, and internationalization.
rich objects
Ensuring that the new chat design system would be dynamic and feel alive, it felt like there was a lot of opportunity to innovate on what a chat experience could look like beyond just text messages.
In M2, I introduced a new concept called Rich Objects.
Rich Objects came from the question of how might we build a dynamic framework for seamlessly integrating which UI elements directly into chat experiences?
This new component allows rich UI and actions to be generated and displayed in the chat experience in a seamlessly integrated way that elevates chat beyond just words.
unlocking ai experiences
Chat is no longer only human to human. The new chat design system is designed to scale to new types of AI assistant type experiences.
As we continue to develop this new system, we’re ensuring that the components and design details scale to new types of experiences we have yet to dream up.
closing summary
This work is a high-level summary of the approach to designing a new chat design system that scales across our three brands, DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo, as well as to new chat experiences yet to be dreamed up.
Our team continues to expand and develop the system as new ideas are generated and new use cases are discovered. The work goes on!
special thanks to
Design: Loreina Chew, Miki Setlur, Zach Friedman, Kara Fong, Linea Hogberg
Product: David Bivins, Mauricio Steinbruch, Milosz Zarzycki
Engineering: Lindsey Menges, Forrest Zhao, Wenjie Sha, Tarandeep Singh, Anthony Tran, David Galindo, Tim Guo
Research: Minal Jain, Juliette Hainline
