Building Zomato Gold ✨ — Design process, challenges & learnings from designing a subscription product
With Charu Choudha
In the last eight months, Zomato Gold has sold more than 200,000+ memberships (and growing very rapidly). This is the most successful subscription service ever built at Zomato, and it’s only growing in numbers and revenue.
Why Zomato Gold? ✨
Zomato is a food search and discovery platform that’s been around for the last 10 years. It is used by millions every day to decide where to eat across 24 countries. In 2017 Zomato wanted to capture more of the Dine-out market for which we designed a membership program. We wanted to provide a premium experience when people dine-out. For restaurants, we wanted to increase loyalty and customer retention.
“To get a consumer excited, you have to offer something they’re not expecting and subscriptions are an ideal instrument for surprise.” — Adam Goldenberg, CEO of TechStyle
What is Zomato Gold?
An exclusive membership service when dining out.
It is an exclusive membership program that offers Gold users a complimentary dish or complimentary drinks every time they go out. This membership can be used at any Gold partner restaurants and bars for an unlimited number of times. Users get the benefit of complimentary items with their meal. Restaurants get the offer a premium service to their patrons at little/no extra food cost. Read more about Gold here.
Project Brief 📄
In simplest words
Introduce Zomato Gold as a premium membership plan. Create a classy end- to-end experience for Gold users. Users should be able to easily discover Gold restaurants and avail unlimited happy hours :)
We have initially launched Gold in India, UAE, Lisbon and will be expanding soon to other countries
Gold Value proposition
Why should someone buy this subscription?
- Buy one, get one dish complimentary or Buy two, get two drinks complimentary
- Select anything from the menu — any dish, any drink
- Valid anytime, any day
- Unlimited visits at all Gold partner restaurants
Getting started — The Design Process 🤸
1. Research
Looking out of the box
While researching we saw a boom in membership plans and subscription models in the market. Since this was the first ever membership plan Zomato was coming up with, it was important for us to look at some of the most popular membership plans across geographies like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple Music, Starbucks, Entertainer (in Dubai) etc. We looked at their product flow, understood the primary objectives, and noticed how they hook users onto their product.
Then, we brainstormed how to design the experience of buying a membership from a physical store internally within our team. Thinking of Zomato Gold as a physical product, we held out a demo conversation which would happen between a seller and a buyer. This exercise helped us to understand the kind of questions a customer might have while buying Zomato Gold membership.
2. Product Principles
The bricks and stones that lay the foundation of Zomato Gold
Keeping all the value proposition in mind, we listed down some key principles which defined Zomato gold as a product and helped us make better design decisions. Some of the principles are as follows:
- Create a premium membership experience which feels exclusive and classy.
- Build a feeling of trust in user’s mind, that they are investing in a good product and it will be of great value.
- Ensure clear and straight forward communication about the product.
- Make it easy for users to discover Gold restaurants
- Make the process of redeeming the Gold visit easy for users
3. Journey Map
And the journey begins
We started to flesh out the basic idea with the help of post-its, to get clarity about how Gold membership can be bought and redeemed at the restaurants.
4. Storyboard
yes, everything starts with a story!
While diving deep into the user flows, we figured out the core scenarios of how gold membership will be used. By the end of this exercise we had a storyboard ready with 2 major flows:
Scenario 1: Discovering & buying Zomato Gold.
Scenario 2: Finding a Gold restaurant and unlocking a visit there. Then user rates & reviews his experience.
5. Wireframes
With the help of storyboards we had a list of screens to cover all scenarios and then we started to do grayscale wireframes to detail out the flows.
- Gold plan page - How and from where to buy Gold membership.
2. Entry points - How to find a Gold partner restaurant.
3. Unlock a visit - How to redeem a gold visit.
4. How to rate your Gold Dine-in experience.
6. Visualising Gold 🔶
After that, it was time for us to give it some visual identity and hence we started creating a mood board for some inspiration. These were some of the emotions we wanted a Gold user to experience:
Premium, Top Notch Experience, Classy, Happy Hours, Drinks & Food, Delightful, Elegant, Niche
Picking these key elements from the mood board, we came up with the branding, color palette, iconography and developed the entire user interface.
Final Product
- Buy Gold Membership
2. Redeem your visit at Gold partner restaurant
3. Cancellation membership
4. Buy Zomato Gold via website
Challenges and Insights 🎯
- Positioning Gold well within Zomato
Creating enough visibility for users to know that Zomato is introducing Gold membership but keeping it in mind that we are not overwhelming the users. We kept the entire integration of Zomato gold subtle in the app so that it syncs seamlessly with the rest of the app.
2. Clear communication
Since Gold is a too-good-to-be-true product, it was very crucial for us to communicate its value proposition to our users in a simple & user-friendly manner. We spent a lot of time proofreading the copy. To validate it, we tested the copy with the different set of users and tried to see what they understood. Based on their concerns & confusions, we reworked on the copy and got it to perfection.
Example: Value prop copy options and our choice.
Created additional FAQs, positioned right below the value prop to reduce anxiety.
3. Social proof
In order to show users why Zomato Gold membership is valued and trusted, we used various tools like showcasing user testimonials in their network and a referral program to emphasise the product’s value. Word of mouth and referrals worked wonders for us. 40% of our total sales were referral driven.
4. Reducing anxiety
While buying the membership, we tried to remove all instances of anxiety in user’s mind. We explained the plans available upfront, showed all gold partner restaurants and provided live chat support to users for any query. We kept the chat head persistent and floating throughout to be able to resolve all user queries which might stop them to proceed further.
5. Being exclusive
We had to make sure that Gold feels like an elite and luxury membership, therefore, the entire visual identity of the product was done around the same theme. Also, we came up with the business idea of opening limited subscriptions per interval to maintain the exclusivity.
Conclusion
According to gold partner restaurants: There has been a considerable increase in new customer acquisition and improvement in customer loyalty, which was the biggest driver for satisfaction with Zomato Gold. Additionally, we found that there is a 3x increase in Zomato traffic on Gold vis-a-vis non-Gold restaurants.
According to Gold members: Zomato Gold offers “great value” and that has continued to remain the key proposition driver. Gold is making dining out a lot more affordable than it used to be. Additionally, gold is helping users explore new restaurants — 83% of our users discovered and visited a Gold partner restaurant for the first time, after becoming a member.
Zomato is a search and discovery platform at the core — and we are so happy that Gold is adding to the spirit of Zomato in a big way.
