Dropbox's New Android App Is All About Invisible Design

An exclusive look at how Dropbox designers put users at the center of the redesign.

When it came time to redesign Dropbox's five-year-old Android app, the goal was to downplay design even more. And damned if they didn't pull it off. Now, that may not seem like an impressive feat, but the company managed to make the UI even more straightforward.

Dropbox doesn't come to mind when you think of design-driven companies, and that's just fine with Alex Castellarnau, the company's head of design. From its beginning in 2007, the company's design efforts have been intentionally low-profile. “We aspire to be as invisible as possible,” Castellarnau says.

This makes sense, because the straightforward act of sharing documents shouldn't require fancy UI moves. But Dropbox wants to strike a balance between mere simplicity and the kind of approachability famously exemplified by Apple’s smiling Mac icon, designed by Susan Kare in 1984. In bringing the app up to date with Google's Material Design standards, the company saw an opportunity to improve how the app functioned in the hands of users.

For that, Castellarnau and his team devised a main menu of just four---count ’em, four---buttons people actually need: files, photos, favorites (for offline access of files), and notifications. Those four buttons replace a tab bar strewn with icons that, while fairly simple, weren't easily the ones that people most often used. “A lot of times, designers are about ‘Let’s disrupt. Let’s create,” Castellarnau says. “That would have been the wrong approach in this case. The right approach was to surface what is most important for our users.”

Two Clicks

To figure out what to remove and what to place in the foreground, the design team interviewed and observed users of Dropbox and other file-syncing services. And it discovered one particularly important feature, the ability to search for specific files, was buried in the app settings. Having to access a second drop-down menu posed a headache for users who needed to find, say, a presentation and email it to a prospective client quickly.

“I have a principle that anything that’s two clicks away---or two touches away if you’re on a touchscreen---is irrelevant to users,” Castellarnau says. “Search was literally two touches away.”

Now, the magnifying-glass icon sits where a user would intuitively look for it---above the list of file folders.

Dropbox

The team also discovered that the "Favorites" function was trying to do too much. By clicking on its star-shaped icon, users could bookmark certain files for future reference. But what people really used it for was to save documents for offline access.

“Having those two meanings baked into one icon made our users confused,” says Alex Miles, one of the designers who worked on the app redesign. “We had to be honest with ourselves and our users with this feature to make it only for offline files.” In a future rollout of the app, Favorites will be renamed “Offline,” in keeping with the way most people had been using it, and be accompanied by a short explanation of how it works.

Sometimes an Icon's Meaning Isn't Obvious

There was one button the team decided to keep in the main menu even though few people used it. The bell icon represents notifications of activities in your account---when some shares a file with you, for instance---but that was news to app users. “Nobody knew what that bell was about,” Castellarnau says. “Everybody gave a different answer.” Plus, nobody clicked on it, which was a bigger problem. The very thing that was meant to lighten a user’s cognitive load through visual shorthand---an icon---led to more confusion and, ultimately, avoidance.

So the designers labeled it. To the right of the bell is a descriptive noun, “notifications.” Clarity achieved, albeit with 13-character word.

A crystal-clear four-feature main menu keeps users from scratching their heads. But ease of use isn’t always enough to win brand loyalists. For that, Dropbox has cultivated a whimsical personality expressed through playful animations.

Dropbox has always deployed illustrations as a way to bring a human feel to such technical-sounding activities as data syncing. That hasn't changed, even though the company is now valued at $10 billion. The sign-up window on the new app displays how you can send and access files from anywhere, whether you're on a train, airplane, or double-decker bus. (Castellarnau thinks a double-decker bus has more emotional resonance than a single-decker one.)

Illustrations can also turn an aggravating error message into a charming mea culpa---or at least a sign that the app was made by humans for humans. "We are not perfect," Castellarnau says, "like anybody else."