ketch-Up: Crafting a Warmer, Safer Path to Adult Friendships
End-to-End Application
Enterprise Platform
Business Type – Community nonprofit – Aug-Oct 2025
Highlight Overview
ketch-Up is a community platform that helps women build real, lasting friendships through small, intentional in-person meetups. Interest in the community was strong, but most first-time visitors hesitated at the final step — they browsed, but didn’t register to attend meetups. Through user interviews, a heuristic review, and an analytics audit, I traced the drop-off to two root causes: the homepage didn’t clearly explain what ketch-Up was or who it was for, and the meetup pages didn’t give women the confidence or practical detail they needed to commit to showing up in person.
I redesigned the homepage and meetup flow around one goal: turn passive curiosity into confident registration. That meant rebuilding the mobile experience with instant clarity, visible trust signals (real host profiles, transparent pricing, peer reviews), and a low-pressure, small-group framing that competitors weren’t offering. I validated the direction with an unmoderated usability test of 22 participants before hand over to the client.
Impact
Test participants reported feeling significantly safer and more informed after the redesign, and I caught and fixed a checkout bug before it reached production.
The Challenge
I found out through direct user interviews that when women arrive at ketch-Up, they’re quietly asking themselves two things: “Is this real?” and “Will I feel safe here?” If the site doesn’t answer both fast, they leave.
Research (see Method below) surfaced two core problems:
- Lack of clarity — the platform wasn’t explaining what ketch-Up is or who it’s for.
- Friction on meetup pages — event pages weren’t giving women enough confidence or detail to convert interest into attendance.
My Role & Method
Role: UX + UI Design, User Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Prototyping & Usability Testing
Tools: Lyssna, FigJam, Figma
To ground the redesign in evidence rather than assumption, I ran:
- Participant interviews — semi-structured, recorded sessions with women in the target demographic, covering past event behaviour, introvert/extrovert dynamics, and what builds (or breaks) trust on a website.
- Heuristic evaluation — a structured usability audit of the existing site.
- Competitor analysis — a comparison matrix across four direct alternatives (Plannerettes Inner Circle, Clayground, Side By Side, After5) on utility, pricing, tone, and entry friction.
- Analytics review — traffic and drop-off data, plus a WebAIM contrast check that flagged the homepage’s coral-on-white text at a failing 1.83:1 contrast ratio.
What I Found
- The “vibe” gap(interviews) — women wanted to know who’d be there and what the atmosphere was like before committing.
- Buried details(heuristic evaluation) — practical logistics were hard to find, adding decision fatigue.
- The trust gap(interviews + competitor analysis) — visitors needed concrete legitimacy signals: real photos, host profiles, reviews.
- Accessibility risk(WebAIM audit) — failing text contrast was actively hurting readability.
- Mobile drop-off(analytics) — strong social-driven mobile traffic wasn’t converting, because the mobile layout wasn’t optimised for it.
- Market gap(competitor analysis) — competitors leaned generic and transactional; nobody owned “small, guided, intentional meetups.”
The Solution
I rebuilt the homepage around human storytelling that actually sounds like ketch-Up’s members, and made sure the value proposition lands within seconds of hitting the page. No more guessing what this thing even is.
From there I went hunting for trust, because that’s the real question every new visitor is silently asking: “is this legit?” Rather than sprinkling in a few trust badges and calling it done, I built trust into the structure itself — real peer reviews, transparent pricing, detailed host profiles, and visible legitimacy info like ABN details, cancellation policy, and verification badges. All the stuff research told me people were quietly looking for before they’d commit to anything.
The meetup pages needed the same treatment. Vague listings weren’t cutting it, so I redesigned them around confidence: real host profiles, live seat trackers so you can see a meetup filling up in real time, and a clear “what to expect” section that takes the guesswork out of showing up.
Then came the mobile rebuild, which turned out to be where a lot of the drop-off was hiding. I added a sticky CTA, stripped checkout down to only the essential fields, and made pricing visible upfront instead of buried three steps in — all friction I could see people bouncing off of.
And I didn’t just assume any of this worked — I tested it. I ran an unmoderated Lyssna test with 22 participants, and it confirmed the redesign genuinely improved clarity and emotional reassurance. It also surfaced a checkout bug I hadn’t caught, which I fixed before the next round of testing.
Outcome
This was the first of three UX Harness Projects, where I delivered a full presentation and design file directly to the ketch-Up client.
Stakeholder involvement, from the start
Rather than designing in isolation, I checked in regularly with my course mentor throughout the project — sense-checking research direction and key decisions before committing to high-fidelity screens, so the final presentation held up to outside scrutiny rather than just my own assumptions.
Grounded in real user voice
Every major decision — from the trust signals on the homepage to the “what to expect” section on meetup pages — traced back to something a participant actually said in interviews or testing, not an assumption.
Resourceful, not resource-heavy
I made deliberate use of low-cost research tools — Lyssna for unmoderated testing, FigJam for synthesis — to validate direction quickly within a tight project timeline, rather than requiring a large research budget to get credible signal.
Beyond this redesign, I also scoped a low-cost way to validate demand for a future community chat feature before any engineering investment — happy to walk through that in a conversation.
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