×

Soleio Cuervo, head of design at Dropbox, discusses how the company makes its “magic folder” simple, elegant, and intuitive.

Consumer technology has evolved significantly in the last decade alone. When I first started in the business at Facebook, we designed products for one environment—the desktop web browser. Today, we find ourselves fully immersed in the post-PC era, where people use technology throughout the day across a growing combination of laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. And the number of devices that people need to access their data will likely only escalate over time. So it’s important for businesses to be design-centric and maintain a deep appreciation for how their products and services fit into the cadence of a user’s daily life across different devices.

At Dropbox, we focus on how to make things reliably simple for our users. People’s stuff is commonly on the brink of disaster—hard drives crash, devices are lost, and phones are accidentally dropped and broken. Safe, reliable online storage is a fundamental building block of our service, but we have ambitions far beyond mere backup. We want to build software that makes people’s lives more productive and memorable. I credit the cofounders of Dropbox with being very design-minded. Even in its earliest form, Dropbox was an elegant product—a “magic folder” on the desktop computer that was native to the operating system environment people were already familiar with.

The design organizations I’ve worked with understand two things. First, in order for a product to have global appeal, it should be conceptually basic and universally intuitive. Conceptual simplicity comes from a deeply empathetic and highly iterative approach to design. Second, world-class experiences require combining technical expertise with an understanding of how a product fits into a person’s day-to-day life. These two concepts continue to grow in importance as we become an increasingly connected society. Managing a user’s attention and transferring context across devices require a multidisciplinary approach to exploration and prototyping.

It is also important for business leaders to understand that great design doesn’t happen on the first try, or even on the 10th try. Designers should get in front of consumers, field-test their prototypes, and relentlessly iterate on their work in order to achieve perfection. As products have increasing amounts of access to personal data about their users—names, locations, interests, the people they work and socialize with—software makers have a powerful opportunity to personalize product experiences in ways that were previously impossible. We can “roll out the red carpet” and offer a singular experience that makes our customers feel as if the product or service was handmade for them. The true potential of digital engagement is creating experiences rich with empathy and context across multiple touch points—driving customers from being users to loyal advocates.

Simple, elegant, and intuitive design can be a competitive edge for a business, and it begins with executive leadership buy-in, an uncompromising focus on hiring top talent, and a cultural commitment to great design. When designed accordingly, digital engagement can provide seamless, accessible, personalized solutions for customers.

—Soleio Cuervo, head of design, Dropbox