James_Blog 02_App Evaluation
App Evaluation (Pertaining to how a major company evaluates its software)
Intention
James was researching on how a major company evaluates its software and was lucky enough to chance upon an article from Grab Design Story. The following article briefly describes and illustrates how the Grab Super App was being evaluated since it debuted as a startup in Southeast Asia. Article
The article was written by Rice Tsang, a Design Manager at Grab, previous at Yahoo! & Indeed. She’s also a coffee addict and a big cat lover.
Anyways, Rice joined Grab when it was booming and evolving towards a Super App by not only offering ride-hailing transport services but also food delivery, logistics, and payment solutions. Being a Super App, scalability is a major obstacle for them due to legacy issues and the accumulation of technical debt, hence they needed to find a sweet balance between business viability and technical feasibility yet still able to enhance the user desirability of the existing Grab App.
Key Learnings In order to fulfill the objectives, they needed to redesign the entire UX, visual and structure hierarchy especially to increase discoverability of service categories since the Grab App offers much more than transport services. Besides, they also realized the existing App design was not optimized for older smartphone models with small screen sizes where the majority of its users were using in regions like Indonesia. Rice and her team set out many rounds of user research in different regions to validate their assumptions and ensure their user is able to get a more inclusive experience when using the Grab App. This diversified evaluation allows them to make it a more familiar experience towards their users’ mental model while still conforms to different regional and business needs.
User Testing (Images from the article)
They began by user testing the existing Grab App with 8 local participants; A mixture of both regular and non-regular users to neutralize the familiarity amongst for unbiased results. The goal was to understand their users' current experience and their perception of that experience.
Followed by user research with iterative prototyping designs via interviewing, home visits, observations and user testing under both controlled and natural conditions. Upon which, they also increased the number of respondents just to make sure all segments of users’ transportation behavior were covered.
Findings from the first few rounds of testing were all considered and incorporated in the design flow, while the latter rounds were aimed to revise the overall design.
Lastly, the behaviors and evaluations gathered were being analyzed by mapping out the user’s detailed actions from their pre-booking to post-trip experience. This is to ensure a consistent experience across all touch-points of their journey and every decision made was being cared for and considered.
Conclusion
All in all, James felt this is a good read and admired of Grab’s liberality of online knowledge sharing. He believed Grab will continue to focus on improving the overall design system in various aspects and have more engagements with their users for their feedbacks in the incoming near future.
The next significant step that Grab may explore towards is by introducing a more colloquial, personalized and empathetic brand voice, where their counterpart, Gojek, has been undertaking. Both Grab and Gojek provides a service that user rely on repetitively in their daily routine, thus designing with relatable graphics and empathetic strings can go a long way in differentiating a great App from a range of good Apps; Ultimately this would give users a delightful experience from a “need to use” App to a “want to use” App.
References
Rice Tsang. (2018, Nov 10). Redesigning the transport booking experience for Grab app. Retrieved from https://uxdesign.cc/redesigning-the-transport-booking-experience-for-grab-app-52fbe796c36c
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