Quick win · 2023 · Shipped in 2 weeks
Filtering deal tiles — turning behaviour into signal.
The first time investor browsing behaviour fed live into Marketing Cloud as a segmentation signal — built on VentureCrowd's first filtering and sorting experience for deal discovery.
Discovery with intent. Active filters live in the same row as the result count and reset — system state is never more than one glance away.
The problem
A growing catalogue, no way to narrow it.
As VentureCrowd's deal catalogue expanded across ventures, property, and sector types, investors had no meaningful way to narrow opportunities down to what they actually cared about.
The experience relied on a single scrollable deal grid with no filtering, sorting, or search functionality. Discovery became increasingly difficult as more deals went live, while the business had no visibility into investor browsing behaviour or interests.
The opportunity wasn't just improving discoverability — it was turning investor behaviour into a measurable business signal.
Approach
Lightweight filtering, deliberately so.
The design scope was deliberately narrow: search, filters, sort, and chips — no more. With a two-week window, the goal was to ship the filtering surface and the Marketing Cloud integration together. Adding features would have meant shipping neither.
Mobile was designed in from the start, not adapted afterward. A significant share of investor browsing on VentureCrowd happened on mobile — building a stripped-down variant was never the plan. Same chips, same live count, same reset. Every filter action also emitted structured events into Marketing Cloud, turning browsing behaviour into a live segmentation signal from day one.
Faceted filtering and saved searches were considered and deferred — the brief was 2 weeks, and the value of shipping the Marketing Cloud loop early outweighed feature completeness.
Visible state
Make the state of the system obvious.
The most important UX bet was visibility. At any moment, an investor should be able to read what they'd filtered, how many results that produced, and how to get back to zero without thinking about it.
A · Chip dismiss
Each chip removes one filter on tap — no menu round-trip.B · Live count
The result number updates instantly — confirms the filter did something.C · Fast reset
One tap clears everything without a confirmation modal.
D · Empty state
Tells the investor what failed and how to recover — in one tap.Two states, one design principle: never make the investor wonder what they did or how to undo it.
Mobile
Same behaviour, smaller surface.
A significant share of investor browsing on VentureCrowd happened on mobile — which made designing for mobile a product decision, not just a responsive detail. Filter chips, the live count, and the reset action all carried over — same model, no separate mode. Investors who started browsing on desktop and finished on the train didn't have to relearn anything.
Mobile gets the same chips, the same live count, the same reset — not a stripped-down variant.
Two jobs · one UI
Filtering became infrastructure, not just UI.
Every filter, sort and search action emitted structured events into Marketing Cloud — so the same interface that helped investors narrow opportunities also told the business what they cared about.
A · Investor
Browsing behaviour
Every filter, sort and search action is captured in-context. No separate analytics tags to wire up later.
B · Platform
Streamed to Marketing Cloud
Events flow into Marketing Cloud as structured signals, building live segmentation off real browsing — not surveys.
C · Business
Targeted campaigns
Marketing surfaces the next relevant deal to the right investor — and the loop feeds itself with every new browse.
The piece that elevated this from a UI improvement to behavioural infrastructure: investor activity feeds segmentation, segmentation feeds campaigns, campaigns drive activity. Same chips, but they're doing two jobs.
Outcomes
Outcome data to be confirmed.
Reflection
A small UX feature shipped in two weeks turned into behavioural infrastructure the business now runs targeting against.
All work