ketch-Up: Intentional Friendship Meetups

To identify exactly where the digital experience was failing first-time visitors, I deployed a multi-layered research methodology combining quantitative data with qualitative emotional insights:

Key Discovery Focus Areas

To translate these diverse research inputs into an actionable blueprint, I synthesised my findings into two core pillars: target user mapping and strategic problem reframing.

Strategic “How Might We” Frameworks

I reframed our core structural challenges into two targeted, actionable problem statements:

• How might we help women instantly understand what ketch-Up is and why it matters the moment they land on the page?
• How might we make our meetup details feel warm, completely transparent, and low-pressure so women feel secure enough to attend?

Across all synthesis, four critical architectural themes emerged to guide our design iterations:

Journey Phases

• Need Recognition & Search: Rebecca feels the urge to connect with a women-only community. She searches Facebook using the keyword “women” and discovers the “ketch-Up” community. While happy to find a small group, she initially feels overwhelmed by the volume of search results and flaky alternatives on social media.
• Evaluation: She visits the ketch-Up homepage and Meetups page. While she appreciates the concept of meeting over food, her emotional state dips due to confusion over event dates, a somewhat “off” layout, and a lack of clear legitimacy signals (like an ABN or past meetup galleries).
• Confusion: Rebecca reaches out via email because she cannot find specific event details or a business ABN. Her mood hits a low point here as she feels lonely, disconnected, and uncertain of when she will receive a reply.
• Clarity: Her experience rebounds positively when she receives a timely, supportive email from Harshita containing a direct event link. After checking her schedule and reviewing the details, her trust is restored, though she still wishes for minor clarifications like event duration and safety details.
• Purchase: The journey ends on a high note. Rebecca finds the ticketing and checkout process easy, ultimately making a successful event purchase using Apple Pay.

With a clear focus on reducing user anxiety, I moved into rapid concept sketching and notebook layout ideation.

Redefining the offering: Analysed the current product structure and adapted to suit a broader selection of experiences and sizes.

Designing for Radical Transparency: Sketched out dedicated UI modules for meetup pages that immediately elevated the exact ticket pricing structures, specific payment options (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal), and real-time remaining ticket counts.

Humanising the Event Vibe: Prioritised human faces and social proof by drafting prominent “Meet Your Host” introduction cards, host experience portfolios, and verified past participant testimonials.

The high-fidelity mobile first design brought infused real human warmth into a modern, accessible interface design featuring:

• Warm Landing Page: Restructured the mobile heroes to feature a transparent, welcoming and become a member, “Meet our host”, easy expression of interest host form, and types of meetups.
• Chatroom “Fake Door” Test: This test aims to gauge user interest in a potential chat feature. When a user clicks the chat CTA, they will see a message thanking them for their interest and explaining that ketch-Up is evaluating the feature based on demand.
• Reassuring Meetup Hub: Transformed text-heavy event details into a scannable, component-driven layout. The interface explicitly categorises meetup types, displays clear group sizes, showcases dedicated host profiles, and incorporates gentle post-event social features to pave the way for repeat attendance.
• Mobile-Optimised Interactions: Designed specifically for the on-the-commute browser, featuring large, generous tap targets, clear visual card zones, ticket remaining counter with icon, and persistent sticky registration actions that vastly reduce checkout friction.

To rigorously measure the effectiveness of the updated designs, I launched a remote, unmoderated prototype usability study with 22 target participants utilising Lyssna. View

Key Testing Outcomes:

• Rapid Value Comprehension: 91% of participants effortlessly articulated the platform’s core value proposition and small-group focus within seconds of exposure.
• Elevated Emotional Comfort: Users verified that the visible host profiles, upfront group sizing indicators, and integrated safety cues made them feel welcome, safe, and significantly more confident about attending an event alone.
• Early Technical Bug Detection: During the testing process, it was identified that the Figma live prototype had issues with a sticky add to cart button which was a Figma programming bug. I was able to identify this after 2 testers observed in real time mentioned they couldn’t see any CTA to add a meetup to their cart.
  
  Unfortunately this bug was the main reason behind users not being able to complete the checkout process in the initial testing phase. To get around this, I embedded the add to cart button into the flow of the page just for testing purposes.

Above: Lyssna user testing identified the add to cart issue with 9 users specifying Very Hard to complete purchase.

Above: Snippets of the first prototype created for testing