When Crunchbase wanted to bring the power of their platform to mobile, they knew they didn’t want to simply reproduce their existing web experience in a smaller format. They engaged Fueled to design and build a product that would be not only mobile-friendly, but would also be relevant on the platform.
The Go-To App for Learning About Startups & Enterprises
Crunchbase is the destination for discovering industry trends, investments, and news about hundreds of thousands of public and private companies worldwide. From startups to Fortune 500s, Crunchbase provides a business information platform that pairs powerful tools and applications to stay competitive and successful.
An Information Architecture Challenge
The Crunchbase project was an exercise in dynamic and variable information hierarchies feng shui. Because Crunchbase is a crowdsourced database, there is a lot of variable data across entities. The app needed an organized, modular design with components for investors and employees, and had to be able to gracefully handle changing or missing data.
A Bespoke Icon Set
At the time, Crunchbase didn’t have their own unique set of icons and were instead using a mishmash of designs from multiple generations of their site. Because screen real estate is more precious on mobile, moving from web designs to mobile designs meant that we needed to be more economic with how we displayed content.
Search
The entire Crunchbase experience revolves around search functionality. People come to Crunchbase for answers, and we needed to make the mobile search feature as easy to use as possible while quickly providing clean and digestible results. To further optimize the search process, we incorporated live results that populate as users type into the search box.
Crunchbase Daily
Crunchbase’s daily digest of industry and investment news is one of the client’s most engaged with pieces of content. Supporting the content natively while not detracting from the search experience was critical.
Building an iMessage App
We’re early adopters, and seeing as Apple had released iOS 10 during the early stages of this project, we of course wanted to incorporate the latest iOS functionality. With new keyboards on the iOS horizon, we built an iMessage app that pulls in users’ Crunchbase searches and lets them drop them into conversations in seconds.
