Montreal agency U92 has developed a new brand platform and user experience for cloud computing company Peerio to help it appeal to small businesses and professionals. Using some of the design tricks familiar from DropBox, Evernote, and other stylish productivity apps, the brand team hopes to make data security accessible to the rest of us.
Peerio, also based in Montreal, provides a web and soon-to-be-mobile service for secure messaging, e-mail and large file transfers. Its major differentiator is that unlike other secure cloud storage providers, the company does not retain users’ encryption keys, and can’t read any of the data that customers are storing (even if ordered to do so by the government). The company describes its cloud storage space as “a bunch of locked safes that we couldn’t even open if we wanted to.”
U92 designed the new brand identity and positioning for Peerio, as well as the user experience design for both the the app itself and the customer-facing website. It also came up with an explainer video breaking down how the app works in plain english.
Rather than go the traditional route of scaremongering about data breaches and identity theft — and making the app look like a Bladerunner-esque hacker tool — U92 managing director Jean-Sebastien Monty said the strategy team focused on creating an identity that was cheerful and approachable, with bright colours and cartoonish illustrations.
“What we kept coming back to is, everyone is scared sh**less about encryption in security,” he said. “We didn’t want to go down that road and freak people out too much.”
After a long discussion about the brand’s positioning, the company ultimately decided not to include anything security-related in its name. Instead it’s a portmanteau of “peer” (for peer-to-peer file sharing) and “cheerio” (the British greeting).
Other secure cloud platforms do exist, like Citrix, but they tend to be enterprise solutions at a fairly high price-point. Peerio, which is free to download, is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses and independent professionals that work with sensitive information, like lawyers, journalists and accountants. Monty said the user experience was designed to emulate other apps those individuals would have used, like Outlook and DropBox, so that the learning curve would be much shallower.
The approachable strategy seems to be working, Monty said. The app has been featured in Wired, Lifehacker and PC World. Two thousand users signed up the day of the launch, with the number growing to more than 7,000 within the first week. Though those aren’t Facebook numbers, for a niche app, it’s a comfortable start.
