Quick win · 2023 · Shipped in 2 weeks

Filtering deal tiles — turning behaviour into signal.

Deal filtering and discovery built to do two jobs: help investors find what they're looking for, and feed the business a live read on investor interest.

Role

Product Designer · Sole designer working alongside Product Owner

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.

VentureCrowd's deal catalogue was growing across ventures, property, and sector types. The discovery experience wasn't — a single scrollable grid with no search, no filters, no sort.

As more deals went live, narrowing the list got harder. And the business had no read on what investors were browsing for, or which opportunities held attention.

Approach

Lightweight filtering, deliberately so.

With only two weeks to ship, I kept the scope narrow — search, filters by sector, investment size, and deal status, sort, and chips. The goal was to get the filtering surface and the Marketing Cloud integration out together, and adding more features would have meant cutting one of them.

Mobile was part of the design from the start rather than something adapted afterwards. The filter chips, live count, and reset behaved the same way on smaller screens, so investors who started browsing on desktop and finished on their phone didn't have to relearn anything. Every filter action also emitted structured events into Marketing Cloud, so browsing behaviour became a leading indicator of likelihood to invest from the day it shipped.

Visible state

Filters that show their work.

At any point, an investor should be able to see what they'd filtered, how many results that produced, and how to clear everything without thinking about it.

Active filter state — chips, live count, and reset

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.

Empty state — no results with recovery action

D · Empty state

Tells the investor what failed and how to recover — in one tap.

Two states, one principle: the investor never has to wonder what they did or how to undo it.

Mobile

Same behaviour, smaller surface.

A large share of investor browsing on VentureCrowd happened on mobile, which made designing for it a product decision rather than a responsive afterthought. The chips, live count, and reset action behaved the same way on smaller screens. Investors who started on desktop and finished on the train didn't have to relearn anything.

Mobile filtering — active chips and live count

Mobile filtering — empty state and reset

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.

Investor behaviour → Marketing Cloud → targeted campaigns

A · Investor

Browsing behaviour

Every filter, sort and search action is captured in-context. No separate analytics tags to wire up later.

filter_applied { sector: "property" }

filter_applied { stage: "series-a+" }

filter_applied { min_ticket: 25000 }

deal_viewed { id: "tidehouse" }

→

B · Platform

Streamed to Marketing Cloud

Events flow into Marketing Cloud as structured signals, building live segmentation off real browsing — not surveys.

segment: property_seekers

segment: series_a_plus

segment: $25k_min_ticket

interest_score: tidehouse → 0.78

→

C · Business

Targeted campaigns

Browsing behaviour acts as a leading indicator of likelihood to invest. Marketing Cloud runs targeted campaigns, email journeys, and lifecycle automation against those signals — supporting a stated FY business goal.

campaign: new_property_deal

audience: property_seekers

channel: email · in-app

↻ feedback: CTR + filter

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

A two-week build that turned into behavioural infrastructure the business now runs targeting against.

Filter and search behaviour feeds a likelihood-to-invest model — every interaction becomes a signal the business can act on
Those signals personalise deal selection in real time, surfacing opportunities matched to demonstrated interest rather than recency
Marketing Cloud runs campaigns, email journeys, and lifecycle flows against live segments — reaching investors when intent is highest