Dropbox for Android is one of the most low-profile apps when it comes to design. Although its destination is more efficiency driven than design oriented, the guys have put some thought and creativity into it and upgraded its design features.
Their goal was to downplay design even more and make it very straightforward and user friendly. Dropbox gets a serious revamp with new features, with the floating action button enabling you to create a new folder, a text file, allowing you to upload files, insert content from your computer or take a picture.
In terms of design only, the latest version represents a flat, slide-out menu that makes it easy for you to access files, photos, favorites and notifications. The very bourgeois and cool touch is the logo holding the initials of your name, dominating the top portion of the screen in a pretty imposing manner.
The rest of features are very user oriented, with designers having figured out what to remove or replace in the foreground. To make your experience the best possible, the team interviewed and observed users of Dropbox and other similar services. They outlined a specific particularity, namely the ability to search for specific files. The ease in accessing second drop-down menus was difficult for users rushing to find an e-mail or presentation in times of deadline.
Now, the magnifying glass icon sits right in front of your eyes, above the list of file folders. The Favorites function is also reimagined, as in a future rollout of the app the function will be renamed “offline”, in an initiative to keep the pace with the way most people are used to accessing it. It will also be accompanied by a short explanation of the way it works. Now, the “Favorites” function is much too sophisticated, while people just use it to save documents for offline access.
The bell icon representing notifications of activities in one’s account got a new label, namely the descriptive and intuitive noun “notifications”. The designers wanted to achieve more clarity when it comes to the entire capacities and features of Dropbox and seemingly they managed to do that. Everything looks extremely simplified and user-oriented, with a boost of efficiency and less confusion.
All the buttons that were creating avoidance or confusion were boosted and reoriented into the users’ direction. The new version for Dropbox is now available in the Play Store and even if the rollout hasn’t been as quick as Google wanted it to be, the outcome is great. It brings a lot of consistency to the way apps look and perform, covering the weaknesses on Android.
Image Source: blogs.dropbox.com
