Charrette: Dropbox Paper
Charrette: A swift design exercise first established by architecture students at École des Beaux-Arts in 19th century Paris. This is a series of quickly dreamed-up designs, and are produced in a few days to avoid over-thinking and over-designing.
I love Paper.
Paper is Dropbox’s newest product that marries the purity of the Medium editor and the the core functionality of Google Docs. I’ve become addicted to its clutter-free interface and smart default styles — I can now focus on the content I need to produce rather than fiddle with layout, colors, and typography. While the core editor experience is an aggressive homage to Medium’s (blank white canvas, grey-tooltip, et al.), it has taken strides to carve out its own identity, and has an incredibly open-minded approach to integrations (Drive documents easily paste and are previewed in-line, even though it is a direct competitor).
I have few complaints with the product, but the Product Manager in me starts to question whether this is a solution in search of a problem. While there are some nice features Paper provides, it is not a revolutionary step in the evolution of productivity products, and it is still a far cry from its competitors in regard to feature-parity. If Dropbox chooses to charge for this product, what is the value-add for their customers? And if it continues to remain free, does it just become a loss-leader for the ‘Dropbox for Business’ brand?
This got me to think, what use-cases could Paper expand to, especially within businesses, that could take the legibility and usability Paper possesses and make it incredibly valuable for an entire organization?
Company knowledge bases.
Ok, so hear me out. This isn’t the sexiest use-case, but it’s an important part of how to operate within a company, especially as head count expands. Knowledge distribution, awareness, and aging are all crucial components most knowledge bases either don’t do, or do poorly.
Think of all the specific questions or tasks you or any of your co-workers have during the course of the week:
“When is the deadline for the new 401k plan?”
“How do I use the new printer?”
“When does feature ‘x’ land?”
etc.
Employees often search for such answers by carefully combing through an old email thread, or perhaps repeatedly ask some poor soul in Slack. This is a productivity-killer. A company with a well-organized knowledge base can avoid this pitfall by having all of this information in one location.
While there are some solutions out there today for company knowledge bases, many of them are dreadful. They lack discoverability and accessibility which are paramount for workers to quickly uncover information. One of the popular tools today is Confluence by Atlasssian.
Confluence gets the job done, but in all the wrong ways; it’s a creature of design-by-committee and has an feature-set, buttressed by tools in their over-priced and hap-hazard app store.
The team at Paper has a unique opportunity to tackle this problem and make knowledge bases fun, informative, and most importantly, discoverable. Here are three needs that could be addressed:
1. A contextual home
The document sharing or knowledge base platform you use probably has a user experience largely formulated by you: you create and name the folders, you title the docs, you create the tags, etc. While this open-endedness is great for customization, it defaults the user to ‘dig’ even if she doesn’t know where to find what she is after.
By curating one’s homepage to show relevant information related to role, time sensitivity, and trending topics, it allows the user to effectively get things done themselves and not bother others for answers.
2. Better search
Between all of the avenues where knowledge can be found (email, shared docs, messaging platforms, etc.), it is very hard to consolidate information into one place, let alone find it.
Users are increasingly comfortable with asking more complex queries that bring in multiple contexts, which should be capitalized on due to advantages in efficiency.
3. Beyond ‘pages’
Today’s platforms attempt to boil all problems into their atomic unit: a doc, a page, a card. Yet, there are many different types of communication that can occur within a company, but are often forced into a one-size-fits-all solution. Here are some form-factors that allow for more effective creation and communication.
Actions: Unlike highly-collaborate documents, which Paper emphasizes today, actions allow certain users to create pages with an intended audience, due-dates, and completion steps. Use cases such as how to request time off, how to set up printers, etc. are often intended for a specific audience and have an element of time. Actions allows you to pinpoint both of these issues so tardiness is limited and spam is rare.
Questions: These are often buried, have mixed answers, and are often repeated several times by different individuals not knowing where the answer can be found. With names, tags, and verified answers from experts, repetitive conversations and threads will hopefully be minimized.
Forms: It can be very difficult to collect information from a large group of people. Google Forms is relatively affective at this task today, but would be far more effective with a deeper integration into a shared knowledge base.
The battle royale of office productivity is just getting started. With Quip’s recent acquisition by Salesforce and Slack’s ever-expanding ambition, Dropbox needs to make Paper unique and stand out of the crowd. While cloud-hosting documents static files was revolutionary to businesses just a few years ago, this need is quickly shrinking as real-time documents take over.
Should Paper aim to catch up to Drive, Microsoft Office Online, and Quip? Or should it provide the same value, but in a different form that could be more meaningful to customers in the end?
I hoped you liked this concept. Please ❤️ this article and tell me your thoughts & ideas in the comments!
A very special thank you to Neil Patel & John Lago for feedback on the early drafts.
