Want to work together?
If you like what you see and want to work together, drop me an email!
khuyenle0609@gmail.com
Traditionally, like many of our regional competitors, Grab gives out tons of discounts and promotions every month. Marketing campaigns are generally costly, especially with ineffective campaigns where customers are flooded with promotions that just hit the wrong spot. The goal is to spend smartly and ensure our users get the most out of what we give away. In return, they engage more often with our app and contribute more to our revenue.
No one knows better about running promotion campaigns in the context of Grab platform than the local business team. They are account managers and demand planners who strategise all the sale campaigns and directly talk with merchant partners. I and the PM did a road show - 8 meetings in 8 markets to understand their use cases, how they are running campaigns, and gather the known limitation of the current promotion campaign product
After filtering and categorising all the insights, we identified these big problems with the existing product.
• No Thrills, No Stake
Despite the big communication shoutout, consumers are not enticed to purchase when they land on the Grab app. Consumers don't feel the urge to act.
• Too many frictions
The current promo experience was not made ideal for running campaigns. It requires a heavy cognitive load to explore and apply promo.
• Awareness
There was no way a consumer would know when an extensive sale campaign was coming; hence they don't look for it. We end up wasting a lot of budget for no return.
• Low retention
Many Grab customers only go on the app for immediate ad-hoc use cases and hardly have the habit of browsing the app because there's nothing else to bring them back. Meanwhile, historical data shows that those who do browse will contribute higher revenue to us.
/Flash Sale/ (noun): a special type of promotion campaign in which the offers are exclusive and limited by time and inventory.
This is not a novel concept to the consumers in South East Asia since popular e-commerce platforms have been utilising it. In our previous user interviews with consumers from Indonesia and Singapore, many of them have built a habit of checking these platforms daily to hunt for good deals from Flash Sale. Some expressed a love-hate relationship with these behaviours as they realise it can be pretty addictive!
Testing the water
As a quick pilot run, the Indonesia business team ran a Flash Sale campaign by hacking the current setup. The op team created a bunch of promos with short validity time, for example, "50% off from 5pm to 6pm". However, the existing experience must show all vouchers even though it's outside the available time. The Flash Sale vouchers would be displayed in the same list as regular offers, only to be distinguished by their thumbnail images and similar titles.
Despite the sub-optimal experience, the analytic data showed optimism. When compared before — during (Week on Week) 8.8 Flash Sale experiment across cities in Indonesia, there was +58% in GMV and +47% in completed order.
There are 2 phases of a Flash Sale campaign, before it happens and when it is ongoing.
The psychology of consumers change in each stage, and we want to make a blast with the right mechanic.
User problem
There is currently no broadcast mechanic in the Grab app to let Grab users know there will be a promotion campaign soon. It costs the company significant money to run traditional advertisements outside of the Grab app to invite consumers to come to the app. It is costly and takes an extended processing time to bring awareness. We also recorded feedback that consumers feel disconnected because the billboard advertisement gives them a strong impression, but then the experience on Grab app is... plain. Or worse, the consumer can't seem to find the campaign they were looking for. Why not make it more intuitive for the consumer by broadcasting the campaign directly on the Grab app?
Even before the campaign happens, we can create the hype so users look forward to the sale. We give them a teaser! A week before the campaign become active, consumers will start to see the campaign banner appear in prominent space in the Grab app.
Anticipation is the key
The countdown timer is almost an identifier of any Flash Sale mechanism. The countdown generates anticipation toward the starting time. To close the loop, we let users conveniently set up a reminder to return to the app.
Showing just enough to hook
Using historical data, we can personalise a list of users' most attractive offers. The stake here is that they can't see the full detail of the deal just yet. We did that for 2 reasons:
1. Mysterious inspires curiosity that inspires action.
2. Since the campaign hasn't started, the deals are also inactive. So to avoid confusion, it's best to keep a distance there.
Set a reminder to guarantee retention
Isn't that convenient?
Wait what?
This is where you suppose to do a usability test, no?
Why not conduct a usability test?
Although it is a standard UX process to include a usability test with a small user pool before we can safely confidently say the design has no issue, I decided to skip it for a few reasons.
Objectively, it was early COVID time, and all company expense was crunched, so everyone needed to scrutinise every request that would cost us resources (aka money, time, man-hour). In light of being super rationale, here were the questions we asked ourselves
• How novel are the design concept and components to the targeted users?
• What is the unknown do we want to find out about the design?
• What methodology would be suitable to answer the unknown?
The answer to each of the above is long; however, we eventually realise neither our design nor the concept is new to the Grab user. All of my designs use known Grab library components, and the flows are even simpler than before. Even though there were some uncertainties, I decided to bring the design to review with senior designers in the team and get their wise words to iterate instead.
2 months later, we rolled out in small cities to experiment with the new product. Bingo! All metrics were positive like a charm, including guardrail metrics such as BTR and MTU.
A lot of the time, our job as a product designer can safely call done by the time the UX flow is handed-off.
However, in this project, it is not that simple. Although the tech team is responsible for building features and functionalities, we don't control the final assets. The local operation team set up all the consumer-facing assets such as image, colour scheme and content. With the pace of up to 20 campaigns per month across the region, the goal is to ensure all of the Grab campaigns are consistent and fit in with Grab design language. Lastly, I want to make the life of local operators easier by create the tool they would love to use.
Now the problem statement is, how might we design an operation flow that is easy to use yet guarantee the quality outcome?
This project went through many rounds of iteration cycle. With each design update it comes out more promising. Long before the product team decide to make it a proper feature, operation teams from the ground have been hacking their ways to produce different types of campaign, including Flash Sale. Learning from the way they hack the system, this project aims to bring better experience not for just end customer but also the internal operators.
This product has been widely adopted by all 8 SEA markets within 3 months, proving how effective it is in achieving business goal.
If you like what you see and want to work together, drop me an email!
khuyenle0609@gmail.com