Making discovery of places & events easier for
Offline experiences
Role
Sr. Product Designer
Responsibilities
Team management, Research, UX
Platforms
Year
Android, iOS
2022
Problem
How many times have you struggled with making a decision about what to do this weekend or where to go for dinner tonight? We asked the same to our users and we found -
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There is no one-stop trusted tech solution out there for inspiration on going out activities
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People rely on recommendations from friends, family, influencers etc. which they find to be very subjective
Careem, being a superapp, already has a huge network of partner merchants that can be leveraged to expand our services from online to offline segment by making discovery of places easier and quicker.
So, we started digging deeper.
Research
We started with understanding the existing user behaviour - how often do people go out and find places to go to?
We conducted Focus-group discussions in our two major markets - UAE and KSA across different age groups to know about their recent going-out experiences, how did they decide, what factors did they consider, what difficulties they faced etc.
Narrowing down the scope
From these very detailed discussions with our users we came to know that there are way too many moments of going out and we decided to tackle just the high-frequency moments of going out in the first phase to arrive at a tangible and feasible solution.
And to no surprise, the two high-frequency moments of going out are related to dining out - so, we went deeper into behaviour exploration while users go to dine out for various occasions.
We sent out a survey to understand the frequency and significance of different pain points, amenities and factors that we compiled from our focus-group discussions.
Compiling the research insights
Based on the above explorations, we could arrive at the following -
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We would focus only on F&B related going out moments for now
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We would need to make discovery of new places and events easier - by providing enough and relevant information to make decision-making faster
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We would need to incentivise users to subscribe for a membership so that they'd never have to worry about the question - Where should I go tonight?
Designing for easy discovery
Competition Analysis
1.
We started with exploring the existing solutions in the market to understand what already exists, what are their shortcomings and what more do people want.
2.
User journey mapping
Next, we created detailed user journeys for someone who decides to go out to eat/drink. We mapped out different stages of their journey, the information they need and the pain points they might have at each step.
3.
Concepts exploration
Before we moved onto the designing phase, I organised a Crazy-8 brainstorming session with a diverse group of people - PMs, designers, engineers, VP of Finance, marketing folks etc. The purpose was to diverge and explore as many different solutions as we could.
Design concepts for initial user testing
Once we had a complete understanding of what features we want to build and what are the must-have information that makes or breaks the user experience - we created a few design concepts to test out with users.
Unfortunately, we had to shelve the project
We were really excited and pumped with the progress we had made so far but, unfortunately we had to put a pause to it as company's priorities shifted a bit given the macro-economic situation of the world. We couldn't continue experimenting with a new venture at this stage.
But, I am hopeful that someday, someone would pick this back up and see it through till the end. :)
