This study examines the design of the Dropbox Android app with a UX perspective, and highlights the design decisions that make the app more usable, as well as suggests changes that can be made to improve the user experience of the app.
I have tagged design and interactions with three labels, according to how they benefit the following goals of the app.
Information Architecture Overview
The application’s UX analysis will make sense only in context of the various screens in the app, and the user’s journey between them.
Start Screen
The Start Screen Experience achieves two main things
1) Allows existing users to immediately sign in. Saves user’s time.
2) Informs new users about most valuable features of Dropbox.
New User Registration
New user registration process is made as smooth as possible. The idea is to get the user into the app as soon as possible.
During account creation, progress spinner is shown in a light box.
User Login
Login screen has visual feedback to guide the user to log in as soon as possible.
First Time User
First time users have no data in their Dropbox storage. Instead of empty screens, friendly messages guide the user about what each screen of the app is for, and suggests actions to perform related to each screen (Files and Media tabs).
First Time Login
Drop box offers seamless photo and video back up from the mobile device. The first time a user logs in to the app on their device, they are presented with a screen that allows them to set up this functionality.
A first time user is prompted to set up drop box on their desktop computer. This is a painless 3 step process that creates a smart installation package specific to the user for a one click deployment of Dropbox on their computer.
A new Drop box account has a user manual in it by default. This serves the following purposes:
- Allows user to learn about Dropbox’s functionality in detail
- Trains user to interact with files in the app
- Demonstrates the app’s pdf reading capability
Main App Screen
Once user is logged in on the device, opening the app brings them to this screen. Directly jumping to relevant content to provide value to the user. Four main sections, with four corresponding tabs.