Dine Out with Grab

Growth Experimentation

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2024

Dine Out is a feature within the Grab app that helps users easily discover nearby restaurants, browse menus and reviews, and pre-purchase vouchers for dining out in restaurants. It was a big bet for 2024, riding on the heels of a post-covid society that increasingly sought connection in physical spaces. Launched in beta in mid-2023, Dine Out was an open canvas; the team was empowered to experiment freely to drive growth and retention. I designed three major features - Flash Deals, Reels, and Payments - all built and launched during 2024.

+22%

Gross Merchandise Value

+21%

Transaction Value

PROBLEM SPACE

Shifting from digital to physical

Dine Out was a new frontier for Grab. Repurposing existing GrabFood platforms and mechanisms to quickly test our ability to support a dining out experience resulted in a beta that had much lower adoption compared to our food delivery business.

Our challenge was twofold: improving the tools needed to support Dine Out at scale, and changing how users saw Grab as just a digital delivery app to something that could also enhance in-person dining experiences.

PROBLEM SPACE

Shifting from digital to physical

BUILDING AWARENESS

Reels

Most Grab users didn’t know Dine Out existed. To build awareness, we launched Reels: short, vertical videos inspired by TikTok and Instagram, both in the Grab app and across social media.

BUILDING AWARENESS

Reels

Most Grab users didn’t know Dine Out existed. To build awareness, we launched Reels: short, vertical videos inspired by TikTok and Instagram, both in the Grab app and across social media.

We uploaded dozens of videos from trending restaurants in a popular dining area.

These influencer-led videos showcased the full dining experience of a number of hand-picked restaurants, bouncing between food videos and ambiance commentary, to help users discover new restaurants and feel more confident trying Dine Out for the first time.

MOVING SALES

Flash Deals

Once we had users' attention, the next challenge was getting them to take action. Even with discounts of up to 40 percent at partner restaurants, voucher purchases were lower than expected, despite knowing that Southeast Asian users are typically very deal focused.

To boost conversion, the team and I gathered the deepest discounts, packaged them into a unique, time-sensitive module called Flash Deals, and presented it in a prime location on the homepage to catch users' attention right away.

MOVING SALES

Flash Deals

Flash Deals contributed to 22% of monthly Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) at the time of launch. It is still one of the highest performing assets on the homepage at 17% Click Through Rate (CTR).

Redeem Voucher

Redeem Bill Discount

FINAL CONVERSION

Payments

As more users learned about Dine Out, our next challenge was to streamline the deal redemption flow to boost conversion. At the time, users had to bounce between two distinct redemption flows for the two different deal types:

Dine Out Vouchers are item-specific discounts and redeemed in-store via QR code.

Bill Discounts are flat discounts taken off the total bill when users paid for the meal via the app.

This fragmentation left many users feeling confused.

FINAL CONVERSION

Payments

I led the redesign to unify both deal types into a single, intuitive flow. This project was focused on ensuring that users only had to learn one flow to confidently enjoy any Dine Out deal.

It boosted transaction value by 21%.

Combined Flow

IMPACT

Product market fit within a year

Dine Out is now a solid fixture on Grab. The team had set out to determine if the product would be suitable for the market at the start of 2024. We exceeded our goals by June, showing that small experiments and improvements have the power to stabilize a fledgling product.