Dropbox

April 2014 – June 2015

Product Designer

Shortly after I joined Dropbox, a small research and development team formed to investigate new products to compliment the main storage and syncing offering. I helped focus efforts around improving team communication between people using shared folders. We designed and prototyped a number of potential products, eventually launching an internal communication tool just before I left in 2015.

Mobile App

We started off trying to figure out how to add chat and collaboration tools to the existing iOS app.

For some reason we thought “Projects” would be how we’d refer to rooms 🤪 Since we knew so much about file usage in Shared Folder we thought it would be useful to surface that within the room and base rooms off existing Shared Folders.

Showing people and their status was something we were excited about. It kinda made sense in a work environment to tap into everyone’s calendar to try and give you a sense of where someone was at any given point during the day, or what file they were working on.

During a company-wide hackathon I attempted some bolder designs for fun 😂 It’s funny to see some of these ideas crop up later in my career while working on Relay at [[Work/Public Studio]].

A more radical interaction paradigm that I had to get out of my system.

Desktop App

Since Dropbox was used pretty heavily on desktop we also looked at how a native chat app could work.

Patents

Because it’s fun to see how patent attorneys describe work 🧐

Shared Workspaces with Selective Content Item Synchronization (US10001913B2)
Aggregating and presenting recent activities for synchronized online content management systems (US9866508B2)