Grab Remit | Sending money as easy as booking a ride Liow Yong Hwa

Problems to solve

Grab’s business team came with a product and experience proposal that covered the following high level business features and service flow. Firstly, it defined the solution as a digital app that allows FWDS to transfer money back home via GrabPay in the Grab app. Secondly, part of it solutions requirements proposed having a physical store in Far East Plaza or nearby area that enable FWDs whom do not have a bank account to visit the outlet and deposit money into GrabPay (wallet). Lastly, money remitted will be wired through Grab’s Remittance’s partners for disbursement. Customers will receive notifications once money been sent and received . We were given an aggressive timeline. There was a strong push from product manager and business leaders to quickly have visible work done such as design outputs. There was a huge pressure on the design to deliver first. The biggest challenge I faced was challenging the approved business proposal from an experience journey point of view, although the timeline feasibility for that proposed scale was a major concern as well. I pushed back those concerns in the beginning, rather choosing to focus on articulating the possible experience gaps customers might face which indirectly affects the success of the project.

My Role

I am the UX Lead for the project. I led the discovery, requirements discussions, and reviewed the experience design across the entire remittance experience. I worked on the early concepts and user researcher study in the early discovery stages with the Product manager, Business Development manager and Product Marketer. In addition, I worked alongside a Product designer and User Researcher later in the requirements/ scope definition phrase. I stopped working in the detail design phase as the experience flow was 70% defined and started to be built.

The service launched in 2018.

‍

THE APPROACH

Customer First

The first thing I did was to propose quicking understanding the current customer journey and to test out design concepts. This got support from the team as part of the team found a lack of customer validity in the business case. I lead the research briefing discussion with support of the Researcher. Key areas I wanted to have a deeper understanding on were:

Who are our customers?
→ To understand current usage behaviour of Remittance users for both online and offline services.
How are we positioned in respect to our target customers?
→ To find out Grab’s penetration among Remittance users, with a focus on Foreign domestic workers (FDWs).
What’s the Grab Remit experience like for FDWs?
→ To identify end to end user experience gaps
How well does our Design work for our customers?
→ To identify major usability issues early in design stage

While the business proposal was specific in their target customer segment. I wanted to make sure that as a first research study, we reduce immediate bias and have a more generic view of customer’s attitude and behavior towards remittance. We covered Blue collar including FDWs as well as White collar professionals . We also intentionally expanded beyond Filipinos (75%), we included Malaysians, Indonesians and Others (25%). This turned out to be an important decision as the differences helped me to drive the pivot conversations I had later.

Research findings showed that remittance journeys by money Sender and Receiver were shaped by social and economic status. This determined the platform and value of remittance. There were two important findings. One was 29% of FWDs, we talked to, had the Grab app and usage was a month and less. Majority of FWDs do not have credit card, this might meant experience friction and customer acquisition will be harder as Grabpay source of funds were via Credit card. Having FWDs to go to a store outlet did the same steps as they were doing now is not a step forward but a status quo.

HOW WE GOT THERE

Pivoting the idea

Three primary findings informed my push to business to consider pivoting the original customer journey

Target primary customers are not Grab users. There is a clear lack of familiarity with Grab and GrabPay.  29% of blue collar workers has Grab app in their app and most have not heard of GrabPay.
Target primary customers do not have bank accounts. Majority of blue collar consumers are offline (agents) driven. Only 14% use both online and offline remittance. None uses online only. Topping up can be a potential hassle for blue collar  as None owns a credit card.

Early on, it was important to understand the different factors that can degrade the end to end journey. I mapped the to-be journey based on observations and interview findings. The mapped To-be customer journey based had too many friction points due to existing constraints. We run a high risk of a poor first time customer experience and the potential of losing consumer’s trust. We understand from our in depth interviews, word of mouth and brand promise scored high in the highly social FWDs cohort.

The team managed to present a case pivot. Following were changed:

Dropped the idea of setting up a physical remittance shop in Orchard Road, heart of Singapore’s prime shopping district.
Target existing customers and white collar professionals

Perfecting the minimum loveable product

I know there were constraints like technology that the first product launch we will not be able to overcome. With the customer findings, I help to influence a customer driven feature release together with the Product manager. For design, with the support of Product designer, we focused on areas where design can make an impact.

Designing for confidence in key moments

People know Grab as a transport app. Remittance as a financial service is entirely new to people, across the journey it needs to inspire confidence and provide assurance that their money is well taken care of.

The landing screen is the moment Sender decides if Grab Remittance is worth their business. A common behavior is comparing rates, so it is paramount we make it easy and transparent for Sender to know our rates. We also know Sender is cost conscious. We choose to be transparent upfront in our total cost so Sender can immediately make a decision. Exchange rates and all transaction costs are shown up front.

I have to decide what is the sweet spot considering different rates, different payment methods have different costs. How can the design reduce the complexity and provide the ease of use without needing Sender to think or calculate themselves. The focus is to provide what is enough for Sender to make a decision and give Sender the control to go deeper if He/She wants to. We chose to use accordion UI pattern to reduce the information load.

A key design challenge was the large amount of information and statuses that needed to be communicated as the service is not a straight through processing (STP). After the remittance request was submitted, there were multiple transaction status changes before the Receiver could pick the money up at a collection center or was deposited to a bank account.

The confirmation screen was the moment to communicate and guide the Sender through the complexity.

To communicate the multiple status changes, we used a progress bar. To cue the waiting, besides copy text was used to communicate the waiting, we also used a micro-animation to get user attention and cue the idea of “waiting”.

I was surprised to learn that sharing a detailed transaction screen between Sender and Receiver was common. With this finding, together with the product manager we agreed to add this feature as it helps to build confidence and reliability for the end to end experience.

THE LAUNCH

In the next 6 months after my involvement on the project, the product designer continued to work on the detailed details as well as finesse the finer detailer as the app was being built. Although I was not part of this process, it was great to see most of my thoughts and work were brought to life.

On 15 November 2018, Grab Remittance was launched in Singapore and the Philippines. An impressive achievement by the team considering that it was a different idea and how as a team we managed to pivot the idea, avoided a sunken cost and moved towards a customer driven design process.