Overview
Grab is Southeast Asia's leading ride-hailing platform with an average of 46 million daily rides. The company solves critical transportation, logistics, and safety challenges in eight countries across the region.
The market research team found that our users are struggling to report incidents or seek help during emergencies on our platform. The data revealed that only 10% of those involved in safety incidents used the emergency features, and a significant majority of the emergency calls turned out to be false alarms. These incidents wasted operational costs and drove emergency resources away from people who needed it. Ensuring the safety of our users is our highest priority, and we realized that we were not adequately addressing their needs.
This project was a big collaboration that included product managers, designers, engineers, operations, and customer support across our Safety and Driver teams. My role focused on defining the UX strategy, conducting user research, and design execution.
Previous version of the emergency feature.
Discovery
Before jumping to solutions, we still had to uncover a lot of unknowns. For example, how might we:
Decrease the number of incidents that are completely preventable, and as far as possible, to zero?
Create safety features that are accessible, efficient, and useful?
Bring down operational costs from the false alarms by educating users about safety features and how they should be used?
To answer these questions, I facilitated a workshop in order to:
Through the session, we were able to align all stakeholders to the business and product goals. It also created a deeper empathy with our users in developing countries where theft and crime can be common.
To answer these questions, I facilitated a workshop with these goals in mind:
Identify personas to focus our efforts
Prioritize potential areas to research and understand
Understand and highlight key questions, concerns, and thoughts on the project
Early brainstorms of what Safety Center would look like
The Product Vision
Grab Safety Center - a place in the app that our users can access all safety related features including: live location sharing, reporting issues, and an SOS call.
Ideally, this will also improve discovery, recall, and education of the safety features. Because the data showed a high number of false alarms, Safety Center was designed with these principles in mind:
Balance quick access to help in emergencies while creating enough friction to lower accidental taps and false alarms
Balance having the freedom of options while limiting decision making as much as possible during emergencies
The first iteration was also designed under the assumption that providing the user with more information will be reassuring. Our users said during the test sessions that there was too information much going on and it was distracting. The responses showed that we needed to simplify it so users can look at the screen and easily make 1 of 2 decisions: “This is not an emergency - cancel!” or “I need help, call emergency!”
We repeated more cycles of design iterations and reviews then tested in markets where safety incidents are reported quite often, such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
Left: Protoype for round 1 of usability test
Right: Iteration after the first round
Learning From the Mistakes
Some users said that for this version, there was actually too little information. They wanted to know that something was happening, such as texts being sent to their emergency contacts. Even though they see this information after the call for help is confirmed, users still wanted the reassurance that something is immediately happening.
What we assumed was “too much” information was actually just irrelevant during the first stages of an emergency call and made the mistake of removing it completely. It didn’t need to be gone from the design but just slotted in at a different stage of the journey. Additionally, the users didn’t notice the cancel timer which is a problem since we’re trying to solve for high false alarm rates.
The revised designs show contextual information at different stages of the emergency call. The cancel button also has a much bolder call out to prevent potential false alarms since the button in the previous design was not noticed by some users.
After many brainstorming sessions and design reviews, Safety Center was launched to all markets in the region in July 2019!
The Outcome
6 months after launch, we saw the following results:
Decreased false alarms on emergency calls by 50% in Singapore and Indonesia, which freed up operational costs and resources to deal with real emergencies.
Reduced call center cost by 30% in Indonesia.
“Share My Ride” - a feature that lives in Safety Center, saw increased usage by 20%. This feature allows users to send a link to a loved one to monitor their ride location and status.
Increased customer Net Promoter Score by +4, via Grab market survey.
A recently published article (Feb 2020) about how a woman used the Grab Emergency Button to help her in a dangerous situation! Read here: The Jakarta Post
What’s Next?
We’ll be checking in to see how our users continue to respond to Safety Center and learn from our findings to improve the next version.
We can’t forget about the drivers on our platform. We will be creating another version of Safety Center to address their pain points and needs. Drivers are under different circumstances and we can’t assume the passenger solution will fit them.
Biggest Lessons and Challenges
Because the countries in Southeast Asia are so diverse, it was important to recognize the different cultural perceptions around safety and how people react to it. From an operational perspective, emergency protocols also vary across the region, and each country has their way of responding. While we cannot solve every single one of our users’ problems, these are things that had to be considered in the design to solve as many as we can.
