SOCIAL · DESIGN + BUILD · 2024
Common Ground
A neighbourhood-meetup app that felt like a form got a site with a pulse — showing the real gatherings happening this week, not a promise of them.
- CLIENT
- Common Ground, Rotterdam
- ROLE
- Design, development, art direction
- TIMELINE
- 8 weeks
- OUTCOME
- +44% sign-up completion
THE PROBLEM
The app was about people showing up for each other; the marketing site was a hero headline and a sign-up form that could have been for anything. New visitors couldn’t feel that anyone was actually there.
Sign-ups started strong and dropped off before the finish, because nothing on the page earned the next tap.
THE APPROACH
The homepage now shows the week’s real meetups — a market walk, a repair café, a language table — so a visitor sees a living neighbourhood before they’re asked to join one. Proof of life, not a promise of it.
The sign-up itself got shorter and warmer, paced so each step feels like one small yes rather than a wall of fields.
THE OUTCOME
More visitors finished signing up, and more of them came back — because the first thing they saw was other people already doing the thing they’d come to do.
“For the first time the site feels like the app: full of people, not full of forms.”