Distill
At Distill, I led the design of Lists - a powerful application of Distill's AI-generated professional profiles that helps organizers curate and manage groups of people and companies. Informed by over 40 user interviews, the platform was initially designed to transform how people build meaningful communities, whether for intimate dinner series of 12 guests or large-scale summits of 250+ attendees. This initial use case led us to engage in a focused, rapid design process while keeping in mind that lists would eventually become a platform designed to support sales prospecting and recruiting use cases.
Working closely with the engineering team, I created an intuitive interface across mobile and web that makes it easy to discover, organize, and engage with professional networks at any scale.
SPENCER'S SCOPE
Product Management
UX Research
UX/UI Design
TIMELINE
Designed, Shipped, and Tested in Q4 2024
COLLABORATORS
Jon Bass, Engineering
Aiden Zegil, Engineering
Ed Penkov, UI Design
A SHIFT IN PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING
Professional networking is undergoing a fundamental shift from broad, shallow connections to curated, meaningful communities. While LinkedIn connects everyone to everyone, there's a growing need for focused spaces where curators can build and nurture specific professional groups.
THE RISE OF COMMUNITY BUILDERS
Community organizers, from VCs hosting founder dinners to conference organizers running summits, are at the forefront of this shift. While their role in facilitating valuable connections has never been more important, they lack the tools to do this effectively at scale.
dISTILL'S ROLE
Distill's ability to aggregate and structure professional data creates an opportunity to transform how communities are built and managed. By combining AI-generated profiles with purpose-built tools for organizers, we can make community curation and engagement more powerful and efficient than ever before.
Communities, such as the Mayfield Fellows Program, are currently managed in dense sheets
Luma events don't effectively communicate people of interest to attendees
MANUAL LIST MANAGEMENT
Community organizers rely on static spreadsheets that quickly become outdated. Managing attendee information becomes exponentially harder as communities grow. Organizers spend hours manually pulling headshots and details from LinkedIn profiles, struggling to give attendees an efficient way to identify and learn about potential connections before events.
Before each event, I manually compile LinkedIn profiles and headshots into spreadsheets to help attendees prepare. As our events range from intimate dinners of 12 to summits of 250 people, this process has become unsustainable. Even worse, we have no way to verify if the information we've collected is still current.
Senior Manager, Platform @ Alumni Ventures
DIFFICULT TO DISCOVER RELEVANT CONNECTIONS
At networking events, founders struggle to identify the most valuable connections in the room. Without clear context about other attendees' backgrounds and interests, meaningful networking opportunities are often missed, especially at larger events where time and attention are limited.
At a recent AI builders dinner, the organizer introduced me to an investor, and I had to learn on the spot that they had backed two consumer AI companies at seed. I could have had a much more meaningful conversation about how we fit their thesis if I had known to approach them from the start.
Founder, YC Backed Consumer AI Startup
Step 1: Identify Core User Needs
Streamlining Data Management
Surfacing Relevant Context
Step 2: Establish Design Goals
How Might We…
…enable organizers and attendees to move beyond manual data management and focus on discovering and creating meaningful connections?
Core Objective
Design an experience that simplifies how organizers curate and share lists of attendees, leveraging Distill's live professional profiles. The platform should make it effortless to create lists for events of any size, while helping attendees easily explore and understand potential connections before, during, and after events.
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To achieve our initial design goals, we explored a dedicated Lists section of the app for users to create, manage, and share their lists. Once shared, viewers of the lists had a dedicated, Public View to brief themselves ahead of events and meetings.
Initial UX for Lists Editing View: Streamlined interface for organizers to manage attendees
Lists Public View: Rich context to help attendees discover relevant connections
Through our research, we noticed that our initial users were frequently accessing lists on mobile devices minutes before events and meetings, while creation and management would primarily happen on desktop. This shaped our platform-specific design priorities.
Lists Creator View
Lists Public View
Lists Mobile Experience
Additional features
For the Creator View, we prioritized users' ability to quickly add profiles and edit their lists.
Profile Addition & Bulk Import
Search for individual profiles or paste directly from CSV, making it easy to build lists whether you're organizing an intimate dinner or managing hundreds of conference attendees.
Creating, Copying, and Unpublishing List Links
A streamlined sharing system lets organizers create public links and control visibility through simple unpublishing, making public list management flexible and secure.
Deletion
Quick access to removal options through contextual menus, ensuring easy list maintenance without cluttering the main interface.
For the Public View, we introduced viewing modes to handle varying list sizes and user needs.
Detailed and Condensed Views
To optimize for quick scanning while preserving essential context, lists automatically switch to a condensed view when the number of profiles shown exceeds 12 people. Users can also select their preferred view.
Expanding Profiles in Context
Each profile can be expanded for deeper exploration, with deep links providing quick access to detailed professional information. This modular approach helps list viewers gain context in a sleek and intuitive way.
To maintain consistency across platforms, we adopted scalable UI patterns like drawers that transform into full-screen views on mobile. This approach allows users to seamlessly add profiles, match emails to profiles, and share lists regardless of device.
For mobile, we prioritized efficient browsing by introducing a collapsed state that lets users quickly scan through profiles. While our initial research suggested list creation would happen primarily on desktop, we recognized the need for basic list management on mobile, including profile reordering and additions.
Reordering profiles
Users can easily reorganize their lists through drag-and-drop functionality, helping them prioritize and group attendees based on their event's needs.
Expanding Profiles
Each profile expands to reveal rich professional context and relevant highlights, helping organizers and attendees better understand potential connections.
Adding Profiles to Lists
A streamlined interface for adding new profiles to lists, with quick search functionality and clear feedback when profiles are successfully added.
Finding The Correct Profile
Smart search helps users quickly locate specific profiles, with enough context shown to ensure they're selecting the right person.
For our accelerator program, we rely on a team of interns who spend weeks manually compiling cohort directories. With Distill Lists, we can create and share this information in hours, making it far more accessible for everyone involved.
Director of Operations, Startup Accelerator
I organize two founder dinners every week. Before Lists, attendees would introduce themselves in WhatsApp groups, but that format was hard to follow. Now I can share a Distill list where everyone can easily see who they'll meet, and they come better prepared for meaningful conversations.
VC and Community Organizer, Multistage Fund
When fundraising, I often get spreadsheets of potential investors to contact. Now I can quickly add them to a Distill list to understand who's actively investing in my space and prioritize my outreach.
Founder, Seed Stage
This work was completed during a twelve-week contract in late 2024, with Lists launching in early December 2024. Working closely with engineering and product teams through twice-weekly syncs, we focused on building a strong foundation of accurate profile matching before expanding features. Lists has been tested with over 200 users across various community events.
Lists is currently in use, and you can explore an example list here to see the interface in action.
