Slush Platform

The first thing you see when you open the platform is a login window. It is easy to sign in or sign up with Google or Apple, but in some cases, users need to create a profile. Here comes the design for it, where steps are divided into two stages for less overwhelming first–time interaction.

The next step is usually to create a company profile since in order to purchase most of the ticket types, users need to be a part of the company. Here is the first stage of choosing a company type.

If the user is an investor, they are suggested to choose next their investor company type to guide them through the correct application form. I try to keep everything simple and clean in this process since the whole application thing takes at least 30 mins to complete, and usually up to 1 or even 2 hours for a startup as they are required to submit more information. So, we don't want to overwhelm users by taking too much of their attention and helping them to focus on the most important part.

In order to prevent users from the same company to create more than one company profile by accident, when choosing a name for your company, a search appears and suggests joining an existing company with the same name instead.

Next, the user is going through an application process that normally consists of five main stages. The tabs on top are designed in a way that the applicant can easily switch between them at any time without losing progress. All starts from filling out the basic company information, such as uploading a logo, choosing the location, adding social media links, and so on.

The next step is to fill in the general information about the company, which tends to be a lot more specific.

Here how it looks like when some choices have been selected.

Next, users need to fill a product specific information. There are a lot of free–form fields that take a lot of energy to fill in, so to keep it less boring, the selection fields have been added in between.

This is the last energy–consuming section, which uses the same method — some free–forms balanced by the selection fields to keep the user less irritated.

And finally, here comes probably the easiest part to make sure that the user won't drop off at this stage. It is short and consists only of choosing some statement options about your company. Upon hitting "Submit", the user is done with the most difficult part and can enjoy viewing their company profile in full.

This is the final result of the application form. Once the profile has been approved, which happens shortly, the company information is available in full for all viewers. For investors, there has been added an additional feature this year, which can be found at the right bottom corner.

This discussion box is available for all people inside the investor organization to make notes about certain startups and hold internal discussions.

The tickets can be purchased from the shop, and there is a possibility to carbon compensate for your footprint on the checkout. The checkout process is fast and easy and makes it possible to always see the number of tickets and the price on the right in the cart.

After the purchase, the ticket can be accessed via the "Manage tickets" tab. Some visualization of a ticket was added to make it feel more like an actual ticket and hopefully add some excitement to the event :)

The most important part of the Slush Platform is definitely the Matchmaking. This is why startups and investors come to Slush. Matchmaking begins on the platform and it starts from browsing, where users apply needed filters to the profiles they are most interested in. For example, if the B2B SaaS startup is actively looking for funding, they are interested in the investor who also wants to invest in the B2B SaaS startup. Likewise, the investor will apply certain filters to the startups that meet their criteria.

When looking for more information, the user would click 'View profile' and the modal with the company information, similar to the company page, will open on top of the browsing. This will allow the user to shortly view the company information and if they would like to be matched, the 'Send invite' button is there.

This is the scheduling meeting feature. It has been reworked many times by me and about 10 different versions over the year exist and have been implemented. After many trials and bad user experiences, I have decided to make it as quick and simple as possible by providing the user to simply click on the available slot and this can be done 3 times to suggest different time options. In general, this is a lot simpler and more intuitive than what we used to have before, so I'm quite intrigued to see this in real life and gain user feedback.

When the matchmaking meeting has been proposed, the confirmation window appears and it can be also visible from the company profile that the meeting is pending or scheduled.

Another important place on the Platform is the "My meetings" tab, which allows you to view all your scheduled or pending matchmaking meetings. This view has been also developed several times, and the current version is heavily inspired by Front navigation. The approach has been changed from huge card blocks to a system like emails, which allows one to see a lot more and also gives access to the user's own schedule when accepting the meeting or suggesting another time. This view is still under development and I'm planning to improve it a little bit more soon, but the overall idea is this.

There are certainly a lot more features to the Slush platform, but I hope I can keep your attention for a couple of more quite important ones, and all the rest you are welcome to check out yourself by experiencing the platform!

Side Events are another crucial part of the Slush Event, and those are small or big gatherings organized by Slush, Partners, or basically anyone coming to Slush. This is the browsing view, similar to Matchmaking to keep things consistent and intuitive. Here users are welcome to add their filters according to their interests and/or availability and see highlighted carousel section, which is Slush Official Side Events organized by Slush or featuring partners.

The last that I would like to mention is the new feature that has been also added this year – Investor Analytics. It is now possible to Subscribe to the startup (more about this in Node by Slush case, which is also part of the platform) and the Startups get access to a sort of dashboard, that shortly represents how often they appear in search and how many profile views they get. Additionally, they get to see which investors follow their news.

That will be all, and thank you so much for reading! I appreciate the feedback a lot, so please, don't hesitate to connect with me and tell me what you think!

As a small reward, here is a picture of my cat Maya, who is the main user on the platform in all my designs. Have a wonderful day! 💐🌸🌷