Note: Designs include the Singapore/British spelling of “Centre.”
TL;DR: Grab users had trouble reporting emergencies and using the safety features effectively. The team launched a Safety Center that reduced false alarms, cut call center costs, and improved user satisfaction.
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.
Some Grab users live in cities with high crime rates and safety incident reports. 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.
Grab’s old emergency features needed a redesign
Approach
Discovery and Research
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.
We did user research in countries where there were higher reports of incidents: Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. Our goals were to understand the different implications around safety in each country, and to hear our users’ stories about incidents that happened in the past. We wanted to understand how they reacted, and how Grab can be there for them.
Ideation and workshopping
To refine the problem and scope of this project, I facilitated a cross functional workshop between different vertical teams. Together we aligned on:
Identifying personas to focus our efforts
Prioritizing potential areas to research and understand
Understanding and highlighting key questions, concerns, and thoughts on the project
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?
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.
User tests, learnings, and iterations
We returned to Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia for usability tests. From early rounds, we got feedback that the information displayed was too overwhelming in situations where the user might already be stressed. When our later version was too minimal, we had mistakenly assumed what was “too much” information was actually just irrelevant at the time it was shown. It didn’t need to be gone from the design but just slotted in at a different stage of the journey; we needed to consider contextual information at different stages of the emergency call. The designs had to balance having the right information with the reassurance that getting help is immediately happening.
Various iterations through multiple rounds of user testing
The Outcome
After many brainstorming sessions and design reviews, Safety Center launched to all markets in the region in July 2019! 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 published article (Feb 2020) about a woman that used the Grab Emergency Button to help her in a dangerous situation. Read here: The Jakarta Post
Biggest Challenges and Lessons
Despite being considered under the same region of Southeast Asia, each country has different experiences. From an operational perspective, emergency protocols vary and each country responds differently. While we couldn’t 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.
