going from zero to hero
Think about this scenario: you’ve got one product designer, one front-end engineer, and two machine learning experts. How do you make a brand new alpha feature with very little resources?
For this project, I was the lead product and content designer working on the Dropbox web surface.
the design process
the design process
define the problem
Dropbox’s top 3 customers by volume (professional services, manufacturing, and finance) had unmet needs when it came to delivering work to collaborators over multiple versions. Between red-lining, updating, and revising, managing versions has become absolutely unmanageable. How might we create a tool that allows user to compare and share their final versions?
discover the users
getting to the source
Who needs this tool, and what do they need it for? Instead of guessing, we created an ongoing customer advisory group to help us navigate this new feature. We met with them every other week to discuss new ideas, get feedback, and co-create.
competitor analysis
In order to meet user expectations and identify our unique value prop, I delved deep into our competitors. Most notably, I found that people wanted to share their comparisons and edit while they work (both something Dropbox could offer).
develop ideas
idea a simplified interface
In early competitor research, one thing stood out above the rest: comparison tools are clunky. A cluttered UI would be the antithesis of what Dropbox strives for. Instead, we paired down our feature tools to the most essential items.
idea AI summaries
Leveraging the same technology from our Dropbox AI initiative, we realized we could do the hard work of reviewing changes for our users. Instead of having to go through everything one by one, we give them a one-minute read-out.
idea version history
In user research, people who use Dropbox often complain about navigating between versions. We realized we could tackle two problems at once, and refresh the version history experience to compliment file comparison.
idea share and compare
People want to be able to share the comparison with others, whether to show their work or ask questions about the changes. Having a dynamic sharing experience that allows editing was key to differentiating ourselves.
deliver solutions
In order to launch an alpha version of the feature, we needed to pair back our scope to an appropriate first step: what helps us validate this feature in the market? What essential features do we need? After working closely with our engineering team, we narrowed it down to these key features: comparing two files (various formats), reviewing the change log, generating a summary of differences, sharing the comparison, and downloading the final files.
