Keeping creative ideas moving
Industry
Technology
What I did
Verbal Identity, Copywriting, Content Design, Information Architecture
01 - THE CHALLENGE
WeTransfer is a global SaaS company with over 89 million active users worldwide and a suite of products designed to ease the creative workflow. The challenge was to work help communicate their value and products in a way that positioned them as the go-to platform for creators worldwide.
02 - THE OPPORTUNITY
Most users relied on WeTransfer solely for sending large files — completely unaware that the platform offered a broader suite of tools designed to support the entire creative process. The lack of visibility into these additional features meant that valuable functionality was going unused, and WeTransfer wasn’t fully recognised for the powerful creative ecosystem it had built.
03 - THE PROCESS
As products, transfer and portals enable much more than just the transfer of files and the sharing of creative work.
We ran a series of 35 user behaviour mapping studies, where each user guided us through their thought process from first discovery of WeTransfer’s products to navigating the website. We asked users to perform three tasks, as if they were a new user of WeTransfer:
Walk us through their logic and understanding of a WeTransfer product page, what the product does, and whether they want to learn more or sign up to a membership.
Arrange information about the product and features into categories of their choice based on their logic
Rank the importance of each feature within each category in a hierarchical order, from least beneficial to them, to most.
After collecting the data, we performed a theme sort and a priority map to organise the data in a logical way and work out the priorities and next steps. What we discovered from the data, was that users were labelling WeTransfer as a file transfer platform (as the name implied) and not taking advantage of all the opportunities WeTransfer enables: collaboration, growing their business, getting their voice heard, moving ideas into the spotlight.
04 - THE SOLUTION
Using a mixture of our own logic and that gathered from the user mapping, team collaboration and historic data, we went with the concept of “show don't tell”, using product-led storytelling to communicate what WeTransfer enables beyond fast transfers.
Effortless collaboration means more time left to create, make, and grow. Fast file transfers isn’t just about “files” — it’s about helping people share whatever they want to share —work, creations, songs, ideas — effortlessly, freeing up time to focus on the things that matter. If nothing moves, nothing changes; WeTransfer is all about moving ideas forward.
The messaging evolved from functional to aspirational, moving up the abstraction ladder from the “how” to the “why —communicating how the products can be used, and why using them will improve your life.
I worked alongside the talented UX designer to implement overarching narratives for each page for phase 1 and 2. We faced several limitations from the developers when it came to the page structure, as well as a tight word limit. It’s easy enough getting the key concepts down, but whittling them into a two-line sentence that effectively educates and inspires — well that involves a significant amount of trial and error.
The result was 8 story-driven product pages. 1 new careers platform. 1 new advertising platform. New site navigation. And double the click throughs.
Most of this work wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration from fantastic people, who helped bring the work to life: Danilo, Florence, Erin, Matt, Angelo and Bram. Kudos.
