Grip: Redesigning a mobile event app
Grip's event app had solid foundations: AI-driven matchmaking, personalised schedules, interactive floor plans. Feature-complete on paper. But live event data told a different story. People weren't engaging at the moments that mattered, and the features that should have driven business outcomes (meetings booked, leads captured) were buried under too many steps.
The problem was timing. Event engagement happens in 30-second windows between sessions and on the show floor. If the app couldn't surface the right action in that window, users put their phones away and asked someone instead.
The hard decisions
The core bet was rebuilding AI recommendations around context, not just relevance. The existing matchmaking was technically sound but presented generic matches without explaining why they mattered right now. We redesigned every recommendation to include a rationale grounded in shared interests, schedule overlap, and stated goals. The difference between “you should meet this person” and “you should meet this person because you're both attending the same session in 20 minutes” turned out to be the difference between a feature people ignored and one they acted on.
The second move was collapsing the distance between discovery and action. Meeting scheduling and chat were pulled directly into recommendation cards. Previously, finding a match and booking a meeting were separate workflows. We made them one step. For exhibitors, badge scanning and lead capture got the same treatment: fewer screens, visual progress indicators, clearer next steps.
We also restructured navigation around user intent rather than feature categories. Discovery, action, navigation, conversion. Each section mapped to what someone was actually trying to do, not what the product happened to offer.
What shipped
Contextual AI recommendations with rationale. One-tap meeting scheduling from recommendation cards. Behaviour-timed push notifications synced to session breaks. Simplified exhibitor lead capture. Restructured information architecture around intent.
Outcomes
38% increase in accepted meetings. 28% increase in exhibitor leads captured. 24% increase in average session time. 20% improvement in organiser satisfaction scores.