Dropbox UX Teardown

Hey guys.

Simon here, And in this teardown, we're going to be taking a look at Dropbox, which is obviously a file management software, but I'm sure it does a lot more these days.

Anyway, we're going to start with the sign up, we're going to go through the onboarding and then we'll get into the product, maybe upload a file or two as well.

So as you go through the process, I'll just talk you through my thinking and give you my honest feedback on their ux.

Okay, so without further ado, let's sign up.

So we go up here to the top, right click sign up.

Very minimal sign up page here.

I'd almost go as far as saying it looks broken, but I do like that they give us an option to sign up with, social.

So it's obviously pulled through my Google account here.

And if for whatever reason, if for whatever reason I have, already got an account, it's also given me a shortcut to log in with my details.

It is very sparse.

There isn't a lot to this sign up page, but there's also no, bells and whistles to distract the user either.

So in this case I'm going to sign up with my email address.

Okay, so let's put email address in here, and click continue.

Now it's pulled through that email address, from the previous screen.

But you can also edit this email as well, which is good because I have misspelled my email so I can update that.

And now it's going to ask me for my first name and my last name here.

The form field, selection state is really clear here.

I mean it's really simple but it works, it's effective.

So let's type in a password.

as you can see, my 1 password is suggesting a password.

So we're going to use that and we will save to my account.

I also really like the fact that they are not asking us to confirm our password.

Requesting users to retype their password in a separate field is only going to slow them down and it's a lot more prone to error.

So instead Dropbox have this little eye icon which lets you hide and show your password.

They've also got this password strength meter on the right hand side here just to give users an indication of how strong their password is.

Looks, like the password we've entered is great.

So that's fantastic.

I'd rather not received any email updates from them.

So I'm just going to click agree and sign up.

It's taking a little bit of time to load and there we are.

So rather than just take me into the product or continue with the onboarding process here, Dropbox have decided to show me the plans.

Not too sure about the timing of this.

as a new user, I just want to get into the product.

I don't want to be bombarded with pricing plans at this point.

Although they do a really good job here of alleviating users concerns by telling them that they're going to remind us before the end of our free trial.

But for the purpose of this review, we'll just ignore these recommendations and click Continue with the basic Dropbox, which is a small link underneath the options here.

Okay, so as we continue through the onboarding process here, Dropbox have gone a little crazy with these illustrations.

I'm not too keen on them, not sure what they add to the experience.

That's just my personal taste though.

So it looks like we've got a few questions to answer before we get in there.

what are we most likely to do with Dropbox?

So fairly simple question.

Either gathering this information for marketing purposes or maybe they're going to personalize the experience.

Let's find out.

So we'll select, backup files and photos.

So we got some more funky illustrations here on the next step.

These ones seem a little bit more relevant to the question here.

So they're obviously quite keen for us to download Dropbox on our tablet or our phone.

But what's quite smart about this is instead of simply telling users that there is a native app for your phone or your tablet, they do actually give you the option to scan the QR code here or you can send the link to your email address as a means of quickly accessing the app Store and downloading the application.

So this is pretty neat.

this is quite a cool and convenient way of doing this.

Let's skip for now, see if we can get into the product.

Okay, so looks like we now have been given a prompt to download the desktop app.

I mean like, I just want to get into the product here.

I appreciate, Dropbox.

It's probably a little bit more convenient if it is a native application because you can sync your files from your Mac or your Windows.

But I guess I'm not really given any other option here other than to just download the app because there's no way I can skip this process.

As far as I can tell, this is also the first time I've seen any illustrations or images of the actual product.

So previously we had those hand drawn illustrations.

It's nice to see.

but again there's just no way for me skipping.

So I'm just going to click Download Dropbox just so we can get to the next step here.

Okay, so that's downloaded but I am going to just ignore it Like I get it.

They're plugging this hard.

They want people to download Dropbox to their computer, get it installed and set up and start syncing files that way.

Which is obviously much more convenient than using the web app that we are reviewing.

Anyway, what we're going to do is get started with the Dropbox on the web.

So we'll just click this info banner at the top here.

Hopefully we're taking into the product.

there we go, straight in.

So first impressions are good.

The UI is clean, fairly minimal.

Everything is where you'd expect it to be.

So you've got your header at the top with universal search that sits in the middle here.

You've got your logo which probably takes you back to your home screen.

You've got this icon next to it which I assume is going to show me other Dropbox products and know that because that's typical icon you'd see to access other suite of products from the same company.

You got profile and notifications and help over here on the top right you've got your navigation on the left here.

That looks like an info pane or an information screen on the right hand side here and you can't miss it.

Right in the middle here we have an option to drop files and upload them.

I really like the fact that they've got some suggested folders at the bottom as well.

This is just really convenient for users.

it just gives them some ideas on how they might be able to use the product.

we've got a little reminder bottom left that we are on the Dropbox basic plan with an indication of how much space that gives us.

I'm curious to know why we've been taken to all files as opposed to the home screen after we've gone through that onboarding process.

I mean that's obviously deliberate but there's got to be a reason for it.

They're clearly encouraging users at this point as part of that first use experience to drag and drop some files, upload some files and really just get used to the process.

So that's what we're going to do now.

So let's click the primary button here, the blue one, Upload and then file and we'll choose our SAS UX checklist.

And we can see that's uploading, so we get some real time progress bars.

We've got an indication of how long that will take in order to complete just with this little handy menu that's popped up at the bottom here, tells us where it's been uploaded to, whether that was successful or not.

And then we could also retry if for whatever reason that didn't work.

I really like the fact that they've given us a shortcut to copy the link to the file as well from down here.

So that's really convenient if I wanted to share that with somebody immediately.

And you can see the file that's been uploaded is the one that's been selected.

And on the right hand side here we got the info pane which just gives us some details, like the size and the type of file that's been uploaded.

Cool.

So we'll wrap it up there.

if you want your own UX teardown, just click the link in the comments.