Cha Yan Yue Se Global Ordering Experience (North America)

Role: UX Designer · Product Thinker
‍Focus: Business-driven UX · Ordering experience · System scalability

Cha Yan Yue Se is one of China’s most recognized tea brands, serving millions of users through a dense offline network and a mature digital ordering ecosystem.
This project explores how an existing large-scale ordering system can be re-architected for the North American market, balancing brand consistency, cultural localization, and operational constraints.
Background
Milktea is a high-frequency consumer product where speed, convenience, and brand recognition strongly influence user behavior.
As the brand scaled, its digital ordering experience began to reveal friction—not only for users placing repeat orders, but also for the business managing growth across channels.
Most existing solutions focused on visual updates or promotional features, but failed to address deeper issues around decision flow, operational clarity, and scalability.
This project started with a question:

‍How can UX design support both user efficiency and business growth in a high-volume ordering system?
Goal
The goal was not simply to redesign screens.
Instead, this project focused on:
Improving decision efficiency for repeat users
Supporting business growth through clearer ordering flows
Designing a system that could scale without increasing cognitive load

UX was treated as a business tool, not just an interface layer.
The Core Idea
The ordering experience needed to work for two realities at the same time:
Users who already know what they want
Users who still need guidance and reassurance

Rather than adding more promotions or visual elements, the system was redesigned to clarify priorities, reduce unnecessary steps, and guide users through ordering with minimal friction.
The experience emphasizes clarity over abundance.
Design Principles
💻 1. Streamlining Decision Flow
High-frequency ordering demands speed.
The interface was optimized to minimize unnecessary choices and surface the most relevant actions early, reducing hesitation during repeat use.

📱 2. Balancing Brand Expression and Usability
Brand identity was integrated through structure and hierarchy, not decoration.
Visual decisions were made to reinforce recognition without slowing down the ordering process.

🚗 3. Designing With Business Constraints
Every UX decision considered operational realities such as:
Menu scalability
Promotion management
Multi-channel consistency

Designing under constraints was a core part of the process.‍
Key Challenge: Growth vs. Complexity
As the product scaled, adding more options risked increasing cognitive load.
The challenge was not adding features, but deciding which complexity to hide and which to surface to support both users and the business.
Outcome
The redesigned ordering experience:
Reduced friction for repeat users
Supported business growth through clearer flows
Maintained brand consistency while improving efficiency

More importantly, it demonstrated how UX decisions can directly influence operational and business outcomes.
Reflection
This project reinforced the idea that good UX is often invisible.

By focusing on decision flow and restraint, the design supported growth without relying on feature accumulation or visual noise.