SUMMARY
Discounts & Promotions (aka Dispro) is a cross-vertical initiative to enable time-bound discounts and promotions for shippers, layered on top of existing pricing profiles. It was designed to solve: new shippers often failed to create their first order despite having promotions available. By surfacing discounts more visibly in Dash Web, Dash Mobile, and OPv2, and adding urgency through countdowns and expiry mechanisms, Dispro gave Ninja Van’s Pricing & Finance (P&F) and Sales team a scalable lever to run tactical campaigns while improving shipper activation and retention.
#system-design #cross-vertical-collaboration #pricing&finance #design-mentorship #visual-design
⏰ TIMELINES
Exploratory workshops: Jul to Aug 2022
Design exploration & design system handoff: Sep to Dec 2022*
Development & iterations: Jan to Oct 2023*
Post-launch metrics report: Oct to Dec 2023*
👩🏻💻 MY ROLE | LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER
◾️ Co-designed with H🌻, my designer report: guiding her through her first cross-vertical project
◾️ Led the visual/UI design and component creation for Dash banners, ensuring consistency in design system
◾️ Mentored H🌻 on visual hierarchy, critique loops, and cross-team communication
⚒️ TOOLS
◾️ Sketch, Zeplin, Miro, Adobe Illustrator, JIRA, Mixpanel
Dispro on Ninja Biz App!
*Note: While design work wrapped up within ~4 months (with parallel commitments), development stretched across ~10 months. This was because Dispro touched multiple systems (OPv2, Dash Web, Dash Mobile), required compliance approvals (Pricing Control Form → Pandadoc → campaign ID setup), and needed QA across several markets. Early rollouts also surfaced unexpected edge cases, which required backend redesigns before full release.
A brief snapshot of the service blueprint on how pricing is determined for every shipper - it’s a longggggggg process!
[1] Business context
At Ninja Van, getting a shipper to send their first parcel is a critical milestone in the activation journey. Yet in late 2022, even after launching the Ninja Biz App for self-serve shippers (read more here), we found that only 61% of new shippers clicked “Start Order Creation” (Order Creation) after signing up. Of those who did, many still dropped off before completing their first order, leading to low activation rates across newer markets.
Business teams flagged this as a top-line concern and approached Product with a proposal: make discounts and promotions more visible earlier in the funnel to nudge shippers towards their first order. Their hypothesis was that existing promotions weren’t being communicated effectively. In many cases, discounts were auto-applied only after order creation was completed (and this is NOT EVEN visible in our external-facing systems! 💀). By then, it was often too late to influence shipper behaviour, as drop-offs had already happened upstream.
After referencing our internal Mixpanel data to validate the drop-off rates, my team focused on two core problems:
Lack of awareness: Promotions were buried deep in the order creation flow, where many shippers had already abandoned the process.
Lack of urgency: Even when promotions were applied, they didn't surface at decision-making moments, leaving shippers with little incentive to act quickly.
[2] Why the problem matters
Shippers who don’t complete their first order within days of signing up are far less likely to return, directly affecting activation and retention rates. Since promotions were already a core business lever, improving visibility and urgency was a low-hanging opportunity with high impact.
Instead of launching a full research study, we leaned on our Mixpanel data and feedback from Sales and Ops to guide product direction. The numbers told a clear story of where shippers were dropping off, allowing us to prioritise design and engineering effort where it mattered most — at the top of the funnel.
🎶🎶🎶
What we did
This became the starting point for Discounts & Promotions (Dispro), a cross-vertical initiative to make promotions more visible and time-sensitive across key products.
Operator v2 (OPv2): where Pricing & Finance and Sales teams set up and manage campaigns through the Discount & Promotion module.
Ninja Biz App (mobile): built for micro-business and social sellers, particularly in Thailand and Vietnam.
Ninja Dashboard (web): the web-based platform used broadly across markets for order creation and tracking.
By designing visibility into early entry points (homepage, order creation form) and layering urgency with countdown timers and expiry mechanisms, we reframed promotions from hidden discounts into conversion drivers at the top of the funnel.
[3] Exploring the solution space
Before diving into execution, I encouraged H🌻to kickstart a cross-platform brainstorming workshop with our design team of 3. The goal was to map out how shippers might access discounts and promotions consistently across all shipper-facing products, which are owned by separate designers, and then identify where awareness or urgency could break down.
We examined every touchpoint in the ecosystem:
Ninja Dash Web & Mobile App - homepage, order creation, post-checkout journeys.
Operator v2 (OPv2) - where campaigns are created/managed, ensuring reliable flow into shipper-facing products.
PUDO (Pick-up & Drop-off) - whether partner touchpoints could reinforce promotions.
Other platforms - edge cases such as offline comms or partner channels.
We then clustered ideas by visibility vs urgency and prioritised with PMs and engineers:
Phase 1: Homepage banners, prompts, order creation visibility (high impact, low dependency).
Future phases: Gamified countdown timers, cross-platform stacking.
Archived ideas: Lower-priority explorations for potential revisiting.
This workshop aligned the design team around “visibility” and “urgency” as the twin design levers of Dispro. It also gave H🌻valuable exposure to how designers co-create across products before narrowing to execution.
Brainstorming workshop across Ninja Biz App, Ninja Dashboard, OPv2 and PUDO platforms
My role as the Lead Designer & Manager
Alongside the team workshop, I set up the project as a co-design process with H🌻, since this was her first cross-vertical initiative.
Craft leadership - I led the visual/UI design, establishing a consistent family of banner components and codifying them into our design system.
Mentorship - I guided her through visual hierarchy, component decisions, and review rituals to raise her craft confidence.
Cross-team navigation - I scaffolded how to run design sharing sessions with Pricing & Finance, Ops, and Product pods, giving her safe entry points into stakeholder collaboration.
“My role was to raise the design bar while creating safe entry points for H🌻 to explore complexity. H🌻 grew confidence tackling cross-vertical work; I ensured the output still met quality and system standards.”
Left: Coaching H🌻 on how to design components.
Right: Coaching H🌻 on how to communicate requirements that are more graphical to marketing teams.
[4] Designing solutions based on key principles
We anchored on two principles: awareness and urgency. The final shape of Dispro was not designed in isolation, instead it was crafted from active debates with PMs and engineers about feasibility, user experience, and operational edge cases.
1. Awareness at the right entry points
Early discussions revealed how hidden our promotions were:
“Promotions are only visible after a shipper fills up the entire OC form. By then, many drop off. We need to surface it before they commit to that effort.” - PM, Ninja Dashboard Squad
This led to the decision to place homepage banners and claim prompts up front, and to surface promotions directly on the Order Creation form, not just at the end.
2. Urgency through timers & gamification
We explored using countdown timers and expiry messaging to nudge faster action. Engineers raised an important caveat:
“If a shipper’s discount expires mid-transaction, do we still honour the promo at checkout? We need rules to avoid billing disputes.” - Engineer, Pricing & Finance Squad
This triggered us to design fail-safe states: orders created before expiry would still carry the discount, even if completed after the cut-off.
Variants of urgency mechanisms — from countdown timers to limited-use badges.
3. Component design for system reusability in Akira design system
Visual consistency was a recurring debate. Marketing wanted flexibility in banner design, while engineers asked for standardisation to reduce QA load.
“If every banner is a one-off, we’ll burn cycles on QA. Let’s push for reusable templates.” - Engineer, Ninja Biz App Squad
“But local marketing teams still need creative freedom to run country-specific campaigns.” - Marketing PIC
As lead, I resolved this tension by designing a family of banner components adaptable for both Ninja Biz App and Ninja Dashboard - locked dimensions, flexible visuals - and codified them in the design system. This gave marketing a canvas for creativity without breaking developer sanity. These were also codified into our self-serve guide, allowing local marketing teams to deploy future campaign visuals without design bottlenecks.
4. Adapting to unexpected scenarios
Some cases weren’t originally considered. For example:
New shippers mid-campaign: Initially, Dispro required all eligible shippers to be uploaded before launch. But ops raised a gap: “What about shippers who sign up during the campaign?”. We adapted by working with engineers to allow auto-adding new shippers via campaign IDs.
Multiple campaigns conflict: PMs asked, “What happens if a shipper qualifies for two active campaigns?”. The team decided to enforce “one campaign at a time”, and I designed error states in OPv2 to make that rule explicit.
🔹 Error state screens added into OPv2:
“Cannot add shipper: already in another campaign.”
“Campaign expired” message.
Auto-add new shipper flow with confirmation.
[4] Conclusion: Outcomes & upskilling others
Regional business impact and user outcome
Dispro was rolled out across three Southeast Asian countries - Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Based on BI analysis:
Thailand: Dispro campaigns drove a 57.8% increase in average orders created per shipper on both Ninja Biz App and Ninja Dashboard (from 4.5 → 7.1 orders), and an 85.4% uplift in completed orders per shipper (24.7 → 45.8) among those who utilised promotions.
Malaysia: Campaigns boosted daily order volumes by ~10% in November, particularly among returning shippers.
Vietnam: While order creation remained flat, Dispro achieved high utilisation rates, validating the demand for self-serve promotion mechanics.
For product-relevant metrics, we tracked activation, awareness, and urgency:
Activation: Thailand campaigns showed no major lift (5–7%). However, data revealed an important insight: many drop-offs were consignee-centric users (tracking orders rather than shipping them).
Since our product did not distinguish between consignees and shippers - unlike other markets where separate platforms exist - Thailand saw higher drop-off rates. This helped recalibrate our targeting and deepened our understanding of local logistics behaviour.
Awareness: Banner utilisation was modest (15% vs. 40% organic starts), though homepage banners converted better (18%) than “claim now” prompts (14%).
Urgency: Clear improvements. Average time to create first orders dropped from 2.1 → 1.4 days, and same-day orders increased +6%.
Mentorship outcomes
This project ended up being a really meaningful growth moment for my report. At the time, H🌻was feeling a little down - as PIC for our internal Pricing & Finance product, she rarely had chances to stretch her visual design skills, which was something she really wanted to brush up on. Dispro gave her that opportunity, while also nudging her out of her comfort zone to coordinate with teams and products she wasn’t usually involved in.
I saw her:
Run her first multi-stakeholder design shares across products she was unfamiliar with, and learn to lean on other experts instead of carrying everything herself.
Gain confidence in structuring problem statements and hypotheses, moving from simply responding to briefs to actively shaping them.
Sharpen her visual instincts through critique loops and live design sessions with me, skills she later took forward and applied independently in her own projects.
For me, it was rewarding to watch her grow in both confidence and craft, especially at a time when she really needed that push. It was also heartwarming to receive a personal commendation from her after she left Ninja Van, where she received validation from her new manager on her skills, which she humbly attributed to the learnings she received from her time under my wing. ❤️