Portals & Reviews: Streamlining The Feedback Loop Between Creatives & Their Clients

Portals & Reviews by WeTransferis a tool designed to streamline the feedback loop between creatives (designers, photographers, artists, studios) and their clients or collaborators.

It lets you present and organize work in a clean, clearly defined workspace where you can upload all your files and invite others to comment, mark-up, and interact with them via a shared link.

Role & Contribution

I was brought into the initial tech team of 3 Front-end and 2 Back-end Engineers to plan, estimate and shape the technical design of the product. Portals & Reviews was one of the main strategic priorities across the entire organisation and bound to a tight deadline related to a major marketing push.

I owned essential parts of the technical design, planning out our approach to state management, framework choices and itemisation of product requirements needed to build the application. I additionally owned the creation of coding guidelines, testing workflows, translations and deployment processes (CI).

After shipping the initial MVP, the team added multiple features and changes in order to establish product-market fit. Below you can find a selection of my contributions.

Feedback Actions

One of Portals & Reviews core features is the ability to provide feedback on creative assets, e.g. images. The creator of the Review, e.g. a food photographer, defines which type of feedback action they want to receive.

While building the MVP, I implemented these feedback actions across the product. Complexity sat in state management and making sure that actions are in sync across various views and users (creator & reviewer). The team also spent some time with the question of when to notify the review creator (photographer) about submitted feedback actions, as their client might change their minds.

Move Reviews

A key concept of Portals & Reviews is the relationship between a Portal (container for projects) and Reviews (the actual gallery that you need feedback on). It was the initial approach of our Product team to store each Review inside a dedicated Portal, a decision which was overhauled at a later stage and led to one of our bigger product updates in regards to technical complexity.

I was responsible for implementing the “Move Review” modal, which would allow users to move Reviews out of Portals, between Portals, or have them exist as stand-alone items. I built the feature in collaboration with a Back-end engineer, but took on most of the back-end work under his guidance. Complexity sat around updating viewing permissions, share link consistency and testing a variety of user scenarios.

Other features I’ve built:

Report—a dashboard to access all client feedback in one go and sort assets by approval, comments, etc.

Audio Player—visualising audio files and an interface to leave timestamped feedback notes.

Welcome Modal—helping new users onboard onto the product, educating them on new features and functionality.