# Why You Should Organise an Immersion Trip for Your Next Project

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Sherizan Sheikh · May 7, 2019

**Type:** Tutorial

## Summary

Grab Ventures relies on on-the-ground immersion trips to uncover real consumer behaviors and validate hypotheses that desktop research cannot address. Placing cross-functional teams directly into target markets reveals nuanced consumer motivations, such as Indonesian grocery shoppers prioritizing physical product freshness and price sensitivity over mere convenience. Effective immersion trips require pre-fieldwork reconnaissance by local residents, collaborative hypothesis generation across business and tech disciplines, and non-leading question design. Research teams should operate in small groups of two or three alongside experienced local translators while holding structured end-of-day debriefs to synthesize contextual observations. Within the Double Diamond framework, these field insights support the Discover phase and directly feed into design sprint workshops for problem framing.

## Context

Traditional research methods like desktop research, reports, and surveys are often insufficient to uncover the authentic motivations, pain points, and environmental realities of overseas consumers.

## Approach / What changed

Deploying cross-functional teams on structured field immersion trips that combine local reconnaissance, observational shadowing, non-leading contextual interviews, and daily debriefs.

## Takeaways

- Field research in Indonesia disproved the assumption that online grocery adoption is driven by convenience, revealing that physical verification of freshness and price sensitivity are the primary consumer motivators.
- Observational shadowing revealed wet market vendors organically coordinating grocery orders over WhatsApp, accepting e-wallets or bank transfers, and utilizing bike drivers for delivery.
- Immersion teams should split into groups of two or three and dress like locals to avoid triggering facility security interventions or intimidating interview participants.

**Tags:** [Testing](https://yomu.fyi/topic/testing)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/why-you-should-organise-an-immersion-trip-for-your-next-project)