Wire

Overview

Wire is enterprise-grade secure communication built on zero trust architecture and edge computing. Five G7 governments trust it. So do some of the world’s most privacy-conscious organisations.

That level of trust doesn’t sell itself in a checkout flow. The webshop had to carry the brand’s weight — making complex plan tiers legible and the purchase path frictionless, for both enterprise procurement teams and individual users who care deeply about privacy.

Context — the problem

A security product is bought on credibility, not on copy. By the time someone reaches the webshop they’ve already been told Wire is trusted at the highest levels of government — and now the commercial surface has to live up to that claim rather than undercut it. The problem is that a webshop is a different kind of object than a secure messenger, and a sloppy one quietly contradicts the pitch. Confusing plan comparisons, ambiguous pricing, or a checkout that feels improvised doesn’t just cost a conversion — it casts doubt on whether a company this loose with its storefront can really be trusted with your communications.

The harder problem underneath: this one surface had to serve two buyers whose decision-making barely overlaps. An enterprise procurement officer evaluating Wire for an organisational rollout, and a privacy-aware individual buying a personal plan. Same platform, two mental models, two sets of decision criteria, two definitions of “trust.”

Research & discovery

I started from the two buyers, because the whole design hinges on serving both without diluting either.

The enterprise buyer is comparison-driven and risk-driven. They’re not buying a plan, they’re building a justification — feature parity, user limits, compliance credentials, security architecture, deployment options — something they can defend internally. They read tables. They look for what’s missing. Ambiguity reads as risk.

The individual buyer is values-driven and plain-language-driven. They want to understand what they’re getting in human terms, confirm there’s no catch, and not be made to feel like they wandered into an enterprise sales funnel. Jargon and “contact us for pricing” read as evasion — which, for a privacy product, is the worst possible signal.

I treated the procurement context seriously: enterprise security purchases involve evaluation, internal comparison, and sign-off, so the page has to function as evidence the buyer can lift out and use, not just as a sales pitch. I also audited where competitors and the broader category erode trust — opaque enterprise pricing, mandatory sales calls, vague tiers — and used those anti-patterns as the things to design against. For a brand whose entire promise is zero trust and transparency, the commercial experience had to embody the same principles, not just describe them.

Information architecture & user flows

The structural problem was: one page, two reading patterns. I designed the plan comparison as the centrepiece and let it carry the load.

The comparison table was built to be legible at two depths in the same view — an individual can scan the plans and understand what they get in plain terms, while an enterprise buyer can drill into feature sets, user limits, and compliance detail without that depth overwhelming the simpler reading. Enterprise-specific information is available without being imposed. That progressive disclosure is the core IA decision: not two separate pages, not a watered-down single page, but one structure that rewards both levels of attention.

The purchase flow was sequenced to remove uncertainty at every step rather than to minimise clicks for their own sake. Order summaries stay visible. Confirmation states are immediate and unambiguous. In a high-trust purchase, the user being sure at each step matters more than the step count.

Key decisions & trade-offs

Transparent pricing as a product decision, not a marketing one. The category default is opaque enterprise pricing that forces a sales call. I argued for the opposite — published, transparent pricing with no hidden fees — and treated that transparency as itself a trust signal, the commercial expression of Wire’s zero-trust principle. The trade-off is real: published pricing gives up some enterprise negotiating flexibility and some lead-gating. The reasoning: for a privacy brand, “request a quote” reads as “we’ll tell you what we think you’ll pay,” which is exactly the dynamic the product exists to escape. Transparency on price had to be congruent with the product’s whole thesis. That congruence was worth more than the gated lead.

One comparison table instead of two journeys. The safe move is to split enterprise and individual into separate funnels. I kept them unified and solved the tension with progressive disclosure instead. The cost is a harder table to design and a constant discipline about what shows by default. The payoff is that the individual buyer never feels demoted and the enterprise buyer never feels under-served — and the brand presents one coherent face rather than two diverging ones.

Legibility over density on high-trust data. Enterprise buyers want detail, and the temptation is to give them everything at once to look thorough. I prioritised legibility — the right detail, findable, in a defensible structure — over raw density, because in a trust purchase an unreadable spec sheet undermines confidence as badly as a missing one. Looking comprehensive and being legible are different goals; I optimised for the second.

Systems & craft

I was embedded in a cross-functional team of ten spanning design, sales, and development, and I planned, designed, and managed the full design process for the webshop from research through to handoff. Working alongside sales kept the enterprise reality honest — the table reflected how Wire is actually evaluated and sold, not a designer’s guess at it.

The craft sat in the comparison component and the checkout states. Both had to feel rigorous, because rigour is the brand. Clean handoff and a consistent system carried the brand’s weight into a commercial context it hadn’t had before.

Outcome

The webshop launched successfully, giving Wire a commercial front-end that matched the rigour of their core product. The design bridged the gap between enterprise credibility and individual accessibility — without compromising either — and made the commercial surface behave like the rest of the product: transparent, legible, and trustworthy by construction rather than by claim.