Save Your Place with Grab!
Tags: Data, Maps

Save Your Place with Grab!

Do you find it tedious to type and search for your destination or have a hard time remembering that address of the friend you are going to meet? It can be really confusing when it comes to keeping track of so many addresses that you frequent on a regular basis. To solve this pain point, Grab rolled out a new feature called Saved Places in January’19 across Southeast Asia.

With Saved Places, you can save an address and also add a label like “Home”, “Work”, “Gym”, etc which makes finding and selecting an address for booking a ride or ordering your favourite food a breeze!

Never Forget Your Addresses Again!

To use the feature, fire up your Grab app, head to the “Saved Places” section on the app navigation bar and start adding all your favourite destinations such as your home, your office, your favourite mall or the airport and you are done with the hassle of typing them again.

Hola! your saved addresses are just a click away to order a ride or your favourite meal.

Inspiration Behind the Work

We at Grab continuously engage with our consumers to understand how we can outserve them better. Difficulty in choosing the correct address was one of the key feedback shared by our consumers. Our drivers shared funny stories about places that have similar names but outrightly different locations e.g. Sime Road is in Bukit Timah but Simei Road is in Simei almost 20 km away, Nicoll Highway is in Kallang but Nicoll Drive is in Changi almost 20 km away. In this case, even though the users use the address frequently, there remains scope for misselection.

Data-Driven Decisions

Our vast repository of data and insights has helped us identify and solve some challenging problems. Our analysis of millions of transport bookings and food orders revealed that consumers usually visit five to seven unique locations and order food at one or two addresses.

One intriguing yet intuitive insight that came out was a set pattern in user’s booking behaviour during weekdays. A set of passengers mostly commute between two addresses, probably going to the office in the morning and coming back home in the evening. These identifiable clusters of pick-up and drop-off locations during peak hours signified our hypothesis of users using a small set of locations for their Grab bookings. The pictures below show such clusters in Singapore and Jakarta where passengers generally commute to and fro in morning and in evening respectively.

This insight also motivated us to test out the concept of user created labels which allows the users to mark their saved places with their own labels like “Home”, “Changi Airport”, “Sis’s House” etc. Initial experiment results were extremely encouraging and we got significantly higher usage and repeat rates from users.

A group of cross functional teams — Analytics, Product, Design, Engineering etc came together, worked backwards from the consumer, brainstormed multiple ideas, and finalised a product approach. We then went on to conduct in depth user research and usability testing to ensure that the final product met user expectations and was easy to understand and use.

And Users Love it!

Since the launch, we have seen significant user adoption for the feature. More than 14 Million users have saved close to 45 Million saved places. That’s ~3 places per user!

Consumers from Singapore and Myanmar tend to save around 3 addresses each whereas consumers from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia save 2 addresses each. A consumer from Indonesia has saved a whopping 1,191 addresses!

Users across Southeast Asia have adopted the feature and as of today, a significant portion of our bookings are made using a saved place for either pickup or drop off. If you were curious, here are the most frequently used labels for saving addresses in Singapore (left) and Indonesia (right):

Apart from saving home and office addresses our consumers are also saving their child’s school address and places of worship. Some of them are also saving their favourite shopping destinations.

Another observation, as someone may have guessed, is regarding cluster of home addresses. Home addresses in Singapore are evenly scattered across the island (map on upper left) but the same are concentrated in specific pockets of the city in Jakarta (map on lower left). However office addresses are concentrated in specific areas in both cities — CBD and Changi area in Singapore (map on upper right) and along central Jakarta in Jakarta (map on lower right).

This is Only the Beginning

We’re constantly striving to improve the user experience with Grab and make it as seamless as possible. We have only taken the first steps with Saved Places and the path forward involves deeper understanding of user behaviour with the help of saved places data to create a more personalised experience. This is just the beginning and we’re planning to launch some very innovative features in the coming months.