YouSendIt

Redesigning The YouSendIt Homepage

Before I became a YouSendIt employee, I was a YouSendIt user and as long as I could remember the homepage needed some work (see it archived on Flickr). It featured a large interactive Flash area that wasn’t very useful and also large in file size. Not to mention, it was using up all of the prime real estate when viewing the site at 1024x768.

It wasn’t very user friendly at all and it didn’t clearly explain what it is we do. It had also become cluttered from years of new features and promotions being added. The result was a slow loading homepage that was overloaded with content.

When the time came to redesign I first sat down with users (one-by-one) and I conducted user test after user test to try to find out what was working and what wasn’t.  I found that users typically gravitated toward the send form and didn’t pay any attention to our paragraph of text that we called our “mission statement” – this was expected.  Second, we needed to find out what our users typically did once they arrived at our homepage. For this we reviewed our analytical data and monitored users as they used the website (this was separate from my test).

Once we figured out what it was that our users wanted to do; we started to work on our messaging. YouSendIt has the bittersweet problem of being valuable to just about everyone so writing copy can be a challenge.  The result of all of our usability testing, designing and redesigning is what’s live on yousendit.com right now. It went live last night and while we don’t have the analytical data right now to prove it – I believe it’s a success. We hope you do too.

Our user opinion’s and feedback are really important to us and impact everything we do. If you have a chance, tell what you think. Email us at feedback@yousendit.com.

Jon Victorino
UI Designer

YouSendIt 3.0….

For several months the YouSendIt team has been working diligently to enhance our site and services.  We’ve listened to your feedback, incorporated your suggestions, and are excited to finally reveal YouSendIt 3.0.

In addition to a new look and feel, the launch of our re-designed site offers new features and services including file-expiration control (select file expiration by time or number of downloads) and long-term storage options for paid users.

Corporate Suite is live! This enhanced multi-user service can scale with the needs of small businesses or enterprise organizations. With Corporate Suite, IT and network teams can easily manage all users, provide multiple branded Dropboxes for incoming files and have unlimited bandwidth for convenient file transfers without the cost and overhead associated with maintaining FTP servers and large attachment filled email infrastructures.  (We’re looking out for the IT folks!)  Check out Corporate Suite today!  http://www.yousendit.com/cms/corporateaccounts

We look forward to your comments and suggestions. If you’d like to see a feature, share your story or let us know how YouSendIt could improve, give us a shout.  http://www.yousendit.com/cms/contactus

Thanks for being a valued YouSendIt user!

Just a Quick Little Update on Faster Large Delivery

It’s been a couple of weeks since we launched our multiple data centers around the world and we hear you’ve noticed.  Users are seeing up to a 25% boost in upload speeds from our website.

We just received an email from a customer yesterday who reported that he uploaded a 360 megabyte file in sixty seconds from Houston.

Just in time to send out those summer vacation videos!
So get to it!
http://www.yousendit.com

Upgrading Customer Support

As a start-up we want to provide the best possible customer support yet sometimes we just run out of resources. And then things go wrong. After all there is a lot of technology behind even a simple email. Last weekend - between Friday 11 AM and Saturday 6:30 PM your support requests were not delivered. That's the bad news. The good news is that we significantly upgrade our customer support. We will keep you informed on the support services we implement over the next weeks. In the meantime, if you did send a support request over the weekend and have not yet hear from us, please resend your request and we will take care of it.

We are really sorry about this inconvenience. We want to share with you that we had a technical issue that is now fixed and when you resend your request you will get a response.

We're growing - fast

YouSendIt is growing fast - over the last weeks we added another 500,000 users and we doubled our paying customers. We also added new features and released the Plug-in for Apple Aperture. AMD Live Mediacenter users have direct access to YouSendIt to send large files and Applian Replay A/V is going to have an interface to YouSendIt, so you can send recordings to yourself from one PC to another device.

With all the new traffic, our IT team significantly expands our storage capacity and all the issues that you may have experienced over the last days, when a file did not upload immediately or the system was not responsive enough, should be gone by next week. Our statistics show that very few customers are affected, which obviously is little help if it's your file that has problems. Here's a tip if you experience problems and need to contact customer support: jot down the number of the file server (it shows up under the browser window on most browsers, usually as FTF- and a 3-digit number, such as FTF-100) and include it in your message. This helps tracking down your issues. As a paying customer you have a much faster turn-around to get your questions answered And if you rely YouSendIt for your business, as more and more of our users  do, it  makes sense to get a Business or Business Plus account , an investment that pays back fast.  A single overnight letter coast-to-coast can run cost you over $50 - not to mention the hassle with CD-burning. As a Business customer you also get the fastest support response and don't have to wait in line with the free customers.

You may have recently received an invitation code to try the YouSendIt Business Plus account for free. Try it now and you'll immediately see the benefits.

YouSendIt back to normal

Since 3:45 PST (1145Z) YouSendIt is back to normal with all systems operational. Our team has been working the whole night to ensure that your favorite service to send large files is fully functional when you start your week.

We apologize for any inconvenience and we are aware how critical YouSendIt is for your needs to send large files. Our secure data center is monitored 24/7 and we track every system irregularity.

Live from Office 2.0 in San Francisco

The first annual Office 2.0 Conference was kicked off with a reception last night in San Francisco at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art). The sold out event is bringing together vendors, bloggers, media, analysts and companies that are defining and changing how business will work going forward.

YouSendIt helped the participants practice what they preach by providing a dropbox with the Office 2.0 branding for the event sponsors to use to easily send their big files to the event organizers. Logos, photos, brochures and other large art files were all easily sent and recieved before the event...thanks to YouSendIt Business Plus! Office 2.0 is here today with YouSendIt.

Files Too Big for Email?

Has this ever happened to you?

You're on a deadline for an important project. You send an 8MB file using email to five recipients. You get bounce backs because you didn’t know the attachment limits of three of your recipients were set to 4MB by their email administrator.

Or,

You can’t send an important file because your own email provider’s attachment limits keeping changing. The worst part is that you didn’t know the limits had been recently reduced so files that used to go through are now being blocked.

Or,

You have no idea if the file that you sent to six people has been picked up by them. You just don't have the time to keep checking with them to see if they have received your file.

The good news is that with YouSendIt now there is a better way to send big files.

With YouSendIt, none of these frustrating scenarios ever has to happen to you again. YouSendIt helps make your life easier by making sure that your file gets to where it needs to go, as fast as possible. Try it for yourself and see how easy it is to send big files.