Dropbox (Web).

Dropbox is a popular and successful service that allows you to synchronize files with your personal computers, your iPhone, and a centrally located web site. There’s a free version that allows up to 2GB of space; paid versions give you more space. No matter what, file size and transfers are unlimited. Individual clients exist that integrate with the Mac OS X Finder, Windows Explorer, and Linux file browsers to offer seamless integration between multiple computers. Drafts and deleted files are tracked on the server as well.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on Dropbox’s web client, which is very data-rich and offers considerable in-page interactivity.

The immediate impression one makes is that this looks like their operating system’s file browser. There’s a file listing; you can enter the folders on this listing to reveal identical-appearing listings of the folders’ contents.

Top navigation is a row of tabs, kept very concise, serving as the core functions of the product.

The left sidebar appears to be a bit threadbare. But this is so they can make room for search results:

Below this lies the status of your account: how much of your space quota that you’ve used. This doesn’t offer enough data to be terribly useful; it shows the percent that you’ve filled, but not the maximum quota or how much space you’ve used.

Clicking this meter offers this information, but this page could benefit from integrating that data – perhaps when the user hovers the meter, if there’s a desire to keep the page as clean as possible.

Above this are two links: to download the desktop client, and to upgrade your space. This page organizes these administrational links out of the way of the user’s interaction, which establishes a sensible hierarchy.

The file listing employs an iconography that’s reverent to the conventions of most operating systems (e.g. , , and look similar to each other as well as their OS equivalents) with a twist that’s equal turns helpful and adorable: feedback shows whether a folder is shared or not .

This sharing analogy is additionally reflected in the button in the top navigation.

Creating a new folder yields an unconventional but tremendously useful dialog: it focuses to a new row, and it appears as if you’re renaming the folder.

Hover feedback is generous throughout the site, which helps to comfort and guide the user. Hovering the top menu options highlights their border (as above). Hovering drop-down menus’ items inverts them, as on . And hovering files and folders tints their background slightly blue, adds a border, and (most importantly) provides the feedback aligned right – which, when clicked, quickly generates the above pull-down, with options to share, copy, delete, and (with files) view previous drafts.

This functionality pervades every aspect of working with files on Dropbox. It even extends to the desktop versions, which add Finder/Explorer/whatever extensions to perform similar tasks on-device.

In all hover cases, the target to click is the background around each item as well as its corresponding text, which reduces user error.

Top navigation has some nice feedback to view recent events, which reminds me of the little badges on iPhone applications. On the other hand, I try to keep these badges to a minimum, because they – along with their always-red color – convey something that needs my immediate attention. I turn most of them off on my iPhone, leaving only the badges for things that I should check right now: text messages, missed calls, unread emails. Then I suppress missed Prowl messages, Things todos, etc.

Many people simply don’t care about their recent progress unless somehow prompted by unexpected changes in their files. Dropbox’s preferences are admirably simple, but having a way to turn this off would be useful. Another potential solution: change the color of to one that doesn’t convey such a dire alert – like , , or .

I’ll close with two minor quibbles. The “More actions” menu pull-down doesn’t activate anything unless you’ve checked multiple files. This forces an unnecessary step: you must check the files first, then go back to the pull-down and select your action.

It would be better if this yielded the normal menu options – and when one was selected, you were then requested to check the files you wanted to modify. A “Done” button could pop up at the bottom of the pop-up menu after the first file was checked; clicking that would perform the batch action.

Lastly, the prompt to share folders is a modal lightbox.

Modes interrupt the user’s flow, especially if they are deeply involved in a task. Moving these elements to the left-hand column (overlapping search results if need be) would take advantage of the extra room over there, and the prompt would stay out of the user’s way if they wanted to keep working with other functions.

But these two problems are inconsequential in the grander scheme: Dropbox does two things (synchronizes your files and shares them with others) very well. It’s grown slowly in past months, which has worked to its benefit. After you get past setup and installation, their product is simple and learnable with remarkably little effort.

(Lastly, a humble request: if you’re interested in signing up for Dropbox, use my referral code. It benefits both of us.)