Dropbox

Dropbox was founded by two MIT students – Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, in 2007. They have launched their first product at March,2008. Dropbox can be installed into the computer and downloaded to our remote device like tablet or mobile phone. With its powerful synchronization function, users can use the software at anywhere they want.

As Dropbox is a software as a service product, it emphasized three key features – 1.be organized, 2.get in sync, 3. stay secure.

  The first design of Dropbox.

(1)

There are 48 staffs in Dropbox design team. The director of design department is Adam Polselli, and Yi Wei, the staff product designer at Dropbox.  They are the interaction designers who designed the original interface of Dropbox. The fist patent of key interactions was published in February 2014 with named “Systems and methods for displaying file and folder information to a user” (2). (The patent file is in in the reference link – 2).

Dropbox is dedicated in bring simple and efficient tools which can help people to enhance the productivity of their workflow.  Dropbox wants to make sure that users can move seamlessly from platform to platform so there is no learning cost for users when they want to share something between laptop or phone.

Dropbox redesign image (1).

In addition, Dropbox latest redesign is focus on serve team-first functionally for users that to facilitate well-organized conservations and interactions around said file (3).

Dropbox redesigned interface (3).

The information is on the top for users to get a glance, a thumbnail view allows the user to visually browser their files, and whoever is collaborating with them on shared files and folders. In addition, the search surfaces results across both Dropbox Paper documents and users’ files. These redesigns bring better user experiences and organized cloud-sharing services to the consumers.

References:

1. Ideas. 2020. Dropbox UX: How The File Storage App Has Evolved | Adobe XD Ideas. [online] Available at: <https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/perspectives/interviews/ux-evolutions-dropbox-changed-last-10-years/> [Accessed 17 November 2020].

2. Patents.justia.com. 2020. US Patent For Systems And Methods For Displaying File And Folder Information To A User Patent (Patent # 8,645,466 Issued February 4, 2014) – Justia Patents Search. [online] Available at: <https://patents.justia.com/patent/8645466> [Accessed 17 November 2020].

3. Moss, B., 2020. Dropbox Redesigns Its UI For Better UX. [online] Webdesignerdepot.com. Available at: <https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2017/04/dropbox-redesigns-its-user-interface-for-better-ux/> [Accessed 17 November 2020].