Role & Summary
Led design of Gojek's carbon offset feature, built into the booking flow across Transport, Food, and Logistics with a flat per-trip price and post-trip impact reporting. Adopted by 1M+ users.
Business Context
Gojek's two sustainability initiatives (a carbon calculator and tree-planting program) lived outside the booking flow in a separate GoGreener web experience that converted below 1% (Jul–Aug 2021). The business wanted an offset option scaling across Transport, Food, and Logistics without adding a step that cost bookings in a super-app built for speed. A separate web flow wasn't distrusted. It was just invisible mid-booking. Any fix also had to work identically across three services with different UIs and price points, or it would create three maintenance burdens instead of one.
Strategic Decision
Depth vs. Reach
Context: a richer, more explanatory flow (walking users through impact before asking) would build more trust per user, but every added screen costs conversion, and the business case depended on reach, not converting a smaller, better-informed subset.
Options: (1) a guided, multi-step opt-in explaining impact before payment, or (2) a single toggle, on by default, with trust-building deferred to after the trip.
Trade-off: choosing reach meant some users would opt in without fully understanding what they were paying for.
Decision: the single-toggle approach, with impact reporting moved to after commitment, not before.
Why: the offset amount was small enough that a wrong decision cost little; the bigger risk was a flow heavy enough that people opted out before engaging. Trust could be built retroactively through visible impact, not earned upfront.
Design Principles
1. Zero Friction: every added step costs conversion, so the feature couldn't slow the primary task.
2. Flexible Access: one toggle pattern had to work across Transport, Food, and Logistics without becoming three features.
3. Simplified Pricing: a flat, small fee people could hold in their head, not a variable calculation nobody would stop to compute mid-booking.
4. Impact Visualization, After the Fact: the payoff had to be visible, but only once users had already committed.
Key Product Decisions
1. Flat fee per trip: a fixed, small charge added via toggle with no calculation shown at checkout, removing friction and keeping the ask simple enough to need no explanation.
2. Impact reporting after the trip, not before: a post-trip "You've made Earth a lil bit greener" screen built trust through a visible, cumulative impact count instead of an unverifiable claim before payment.
3. One shared component across three service lines: the same toggle, pricing logic, and post-trip screen shipped across Transport, Food, and Logistics instead of three bespoke flows, trading a slower initial build for permanently lower maintenance.
Outcomes
Business: adoption reached well beyond the sub-1% web baseline: 1M+ users subscribed and roughly 4.79 million tons of emissions offset to date.
Customer: users got a concrete, cumulative measure of their contribution instead of an abstract claim buried in a separate web page.
Operations: one toggle pattern across Transport, Food, and Logistics meant one design system to maintain instead of three.
Engineering: reusing one component across service lines reduced the custom integration work needed per vertical.
Support: no support-specific data was available for this feature.
Reflection
The biggest surprise: the pricing model mattered more than the price itself. Users didn't push back on paying. They pushed back on not understanding what they were paying for. A flat number they could hold in their head did more for trust than any impact visualization after the fact. I'd also invest earlier in the post-trip reporting screen next time: it carried most of the trust-building work the toggle couldn't, but was treated as secondary for most of the process.
The principle that still shapes how I design opt-in features: separate the decision from the explanation. Ask for the commitment where the user already is, and save the convincing for after they've said yes.
