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Saturday 30 August 2014

Dropbox’s Carousel Design Deconstructed (Part 1)

Many of today’s hottest technology companies, both large and small, are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas.
By focusing on an integral set of core functionality and corresponding features for product development, these companies can efficiently launch and build on new products. While the concepts are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated.
This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
Part 1 is about the core user, their needs and Dropbox’s business needs, and it breaks down existing photo and video apps. Part 2 will cover Carousel’s primary requirements, the end product, its performance and key learnings since the launch.

The Carousel MVP

It’s been reported, that Dropbox wants Carousel, its new mobile photo and video gallery app, to be “the go-to place for people to store and access their digital photos [and videos],” to be the “one place for all your memories.” In effect, Carousel allows you to access all of your photos and videos stored in a Dropbox account on any device, unifying them in a single interface that automatically sorts files by time and location.
More specifically, the app launched with several key features:
  • Backing up
    It integrates directly with Dropbox’s file storage to save all photos and videos taken on your mobile phone.
  • Viewing
    A cloud-based media gallery displays all of your photos and videos without taking up local storage on your phone.
  • Sharing
    It offers many ways for you to share photos and videos with others, primarily by sending links to view them in Carousel.
  • Discussing
    A new chat thread is created for every group of people with whom you share a collection of pictures or videos.
    Since launching, Carousel has received polarizing reviews. Amidst this uproar of praise and feature requests, we’ll go over how any product or design team could arrive at the same initial release — a critical exercise, especially in a market as crowded as the one for photo apps. First, we’ll summarize what Carousel is, then break down part of the design process for this MVP, and then compare the UI and UX to existing design patterns such as Apple’s Photos, Instagram, Google+, Camera+, Flickr, Facebook, Picturelife and Dropbox Photos itself.

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