Context
DiChung was a Vietnamese mobility platform operating in the carpooling and shared transport space. The market was intensely competitive — Grab, Be, and Gojek were well-funded and dominant. DiChung's leadership knew they needed to differentiate rather than compete head-to-head.
I was the UX designer responsible for a new product vertical the company wanted to explore. The brief was open: identify an underserved mobility need in the Vietnamese market and design a product for it.
Problem
Before I could design anything, I needed to understand what mobility problems Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City residents actually had that existing apps weren't solving. The risk was designing a solution based on assumptions — easy to do in a market that looks homogeneous from the outside but has deep local nuance.
Process
UX research
I ran a 4-week research phase: 22 contextual interviews with daily commuters, ride-hailing users, and occasional transport users across both Hanoi and HCMC. I focused specifically on trips that people took repeatedly — commutes, school runs, regular errands — where predictability and trust mattered more than on-demand flexibility.
A clear theme emerged: a significant segment of users had regular, fixed routes (especially office commuters and parents doing school runs) and were using ride-hailing apps in a way those apps weren't designed for — booking the same route, at the same time, from the same drivers they'd come to trust. The existing apps made this friction-heavy and expensive.
Defining the opportunity
I synthesised the research into a clear opportunity statement: a scheduled, subscription-based transport product for users with predictable mobility needs. Not on-demand — planned. This positioned DiChung in a segment that Grab and Gojek actively deprioritised because it required coordination infrastructure they'd built away from.
Executive pitch
I built a business case and presented it to the C-suite. This wasn't a design presentation — it was a market opportunity analysis with design concepts as evidence. I framed the product in terms of driver utilisation rates, customer LTV, and competitive positioning. The pitch was approved and I was given the mandate to design it.
End-to-end design
I designed the full product: user-side booking and subscription management, driver-side schedule dashboard, and the internal coordination tools that matched users to regular drivers. Each flow was tested in prototype with 6–8 users before moving to dev handoff. I worked closely with the engineering team throughout build — weekly design review sessions and daily availability for questions.
Outcome
The product launched in Hanoi and reached 16,000+ daily active users. The subscription model delivered the higher LTV the business case had projected, and driver satisfaction on the scheduled routes was measurably higher than on on-demand trips — predictable income beat surge pricing for the driver segment we targeted.
Learnings
The best research questions expose what the current product can't explain. I didn't ask users what they wanted — I asked them to describe their actual transport behaviour. The gap between what the apps were designed for and how users were actually using them was where the opportunity lived.
Design thinking and business thinking aren't separate. The C-suite approved the product because I spoke in their language — market size, LTV, competitive positioning. The design was the proof of concept, not the pitch itself.
Predictability is an underrated product value. The Vietnamese commuters I interviewed didn't want the cheapest or fastest option — they wanted the option they could rely on. Designing for reliability rather than optimization opened up a segment that the dominant players had left underserved.