Talabat Pro membership

The problem

From the docs

How do you convince someone to pay for something they don’t understand in eight seconds?

• The number. 82 percent of visitors left the Pro subscription page. The average start rate was 18 percent.
• Why it mattered. Pro is Talabat’s highest margin revenue stream.
• The constraints. No new benefits, a fixed price, twelve weeks, and fewer benefits than competitors.
• So. When you cannot compete on features, compete on how personal the existing value feels.

What the research found

How. 30+ qualitative interviews, a review of three competing memberships, and a workshop with twenty people from five departments.

Clarity	Relevance	Speed
“What exactly am I paying for?”	“Will this save ME money?”	“Page too overwhelming”
“Too many benefits to understand”	“I don’t order that much”	“Lost interest quickly”
“Generic promises don’t help”	“Show my actual usage”	“8 seconds max attention”
“Need simple explanation”	“What about MY favorite places?”	“Need value immediately”

The workshop ended on one outcome: personalisation is non-negotiable. That set three principles.

• Eight seconds of clarity. Value above the fold, no scrolling needed.
• Personal first. Use their data: their name and their own savings.
• Progressive disclosure. Essentials first, detail on demand.

Before and after

Before · Order like a pro

After · your savings, by name

1. A generic benefit list becomes one personal number: what you would have saved last month.
2. The page greets the customer by name.
3. Secondary detail moves to the back of the card, so the front reads in eight seconds.
4. That card became a Marshmallow design system component, reused across the app.

The page has two states. The personal state, shown above, greets the customer by name with their own savings from order history. The generic state shows the average saving across Pro members, so every visitor sees a clear number at once, and is replaced by the personal one when it loads. The amounts in both mocks are illustrative.

Three iterations, two not taken ahead

1. 

   01Iteration 1 of 3

   The beautiful failure

   The bet

   A premium feel, with gradients and motion, would make the membership feel worth paying for.

   Carried forward

   The warmth and the food-first imagery.

   Why it went no further

   It missed the personalisation the research had made non-negotiable. Learning: design inside strict parameters. One week lost.

2. 

   02Iteration 2 of 3

   The information overload

   The bet

   Push personalisation hard: the exact amount spent on delivery fees, favourite vendors, return on investment.

   Carried forward

   Real numbers from the customer's own orders.

   Why it went no further

   The personal data it needed at render time was not technically feasible in the twelve weeks, and the full version, with vendors and return on investment panels below, crowded the eight seconds. Learning: feasibility and simplicity first. Two weeks lost.

3. 

   03Iteration 3 of 3

   Design decisions that worked

   The bet

   One personal greeting and one personal number, on cards that keep secondary detail on the back.

   Carried forward

   Shipped. It needs one personal number, computed from order history and loaded after the page, where iteration two needed several at render time. The card became a Marshmallow component.

   Verdict

   Accepted. This is the direction taken ahead.

The calls that could have gone another way

The same approach solved the other two constraints:

• Arabic, right to left. Separate cards mirror cleanly, where one long composed layout would not.
• Flutter limits. A sliced component approach built the cards from existing Marshmallow parts.

What changed

• Trial sign-ups up 10 percent, with no new benefit and no price change.
• Time on page from 8 to 14 seconds. On its own a longer read could mean confusion; here it rose with trial starts, not against them.

The card pattern went on to shape how the company’s design system handles marketing surfaces, especially in fintech. The basket progress bar from the same Pro programme is on sheet A-03.

With the team

• Lead designer and researcher. I planned and ran all the research: the 30+ interviews, the competitor review and the synthesis. The principal UX researcher reviewed my interview guide and showed me how to reach customers. Alongside: a product manager, a design manager, four engineers and an engineering manager.
• One week of research, three weeks of workshops, five of design and testing, three of implementation, February to May 2023.