During my experience as a product manager, my team and I made it possible to upload and transfer folders with WeTransfer. This is an overview of that story.

 
 

Project / Folders upload

Role / Product manager

Company / WeTransfer

Product / Transfer

Year / 2018

Background

As WeTransfer began expanding previewing functionalities we noticed a significant share of our transfers consisted in .zip files. Because of our privacy policy, this meant there was no way to preview this content on the receiving end. Concurrently, subscribers were lamenting the inability to transfer folders.

“I signed up for Plus and realized that I cannot send folders. I would like a refund in the full amount.” — via Support ticket

 

Problem

  • ~60% of transfers are single file

  • ~40% of the single file transfers are zipped

  • Subscribers cancelling their plan

Solution

  • Enable transferring of folders

Before & After

Can you spot the difference?

 

Before

  • Users were not able to transfer folders unless the previously zipped them. This meant extra work and create temporary files on their computer.

After

  • Folders can be selected and dropped on WeTransfer. We will take care of the rest.

Research

As a product manager, I had recurring weekly meetings with a support liaison to go over the most requested features. Folder support was always in the top 3.

As a team however we were confident in the magnitude of this problem so we decided to run a script to inspect single file transfers, only to understand if they consisted of a set of directories. After a few days, we had full confidence: 90% of single file transfers consisted of directories and sub-directories

Ideation

WeTransfer service lives on several channels: the web app for desktop and mobile, the Mac app, and email notifications. Apart from outlining the overall implications of introducing folders, the proposed design strongly suggested the need to introduce iconography to represent and distinguish file types.

Even though we liked the design, I reduced the scope to just marking items referring to folders. After all, the user needs manifested at the upload moment, while the proposed iconography would mainly impact managing and the receiving experience.

Results and Conclusions

After a few days since implementing folder support, we saw a 40% decrease in zipped transfers and received a fair share of love from our users.

Despite its appearance, releasing folder support was a lot of work. It required heavy backend changes, front-end refactoring, and endless design negotiations. Still, it provided great learning on shipping as little design as necessary and to the young designer in my team on how design goes beyond what’s visible on the UI.