Dropbox Paper: Simple, holistic, trendsetter!
Dropbox Paper, competitor to Google Docs, that launched last year with a web-based collaborative doc-sharing service just rolled out its iOS and Android versions. And darn, is it impressive? Not the fancy kind as you would imagine, but impressive on how simple yet practical and effective the app is. There are three key features from a UI/UX and functionality standpoint that make it stand out in terms of getting stuff done quicker in a clean , yet holistic manner—
- Creating and writing a new doc
From a UX standpoint, creating a new doc on Paper is much simpler (and quicker!) than Google docs with a single tap needed to do so after opening the Paper app. as seen in the image above, they look pretty similar from a UI standpoint. Google Docs is designed to be similar to the experience on Microsoft Word with menus and toolbars for font type, indentation etc. while one could say the minimalist experience of Paper is indeed like Medium with its plain paper writing approach. Dropbox wins the game when it comes to adding images, links, videos and other rich media on the fly, which brings me to the next section!
2. Rich media (and yes, for the developers out there, you got code too!)
A lot of teams spanning various disciplines ranging from developers, designers, biz devs, artists, corporate clients are discussing and sharing media extensively on a day-to-day basis. Dropbox Paper offers functionality to write code blocks and embed rich media from Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud, something Google Docs is yet to incorporate fully. This feature again mimics the simplicity yet elegant format of writing docs that Medium offers. Whether we want to refer to multiple other documents to convey clear references or explain that awesome Javascript effect using syntactically highlighted code, rich media indeed makes Paper stand out.
3. Easy collaboration
Paper allows members to invite others to edit the file, the way it’s done in Docs. But over and above, it also features a sleek functionality in tagging someone in a document/task/comment to get their attention. There’s also an ‘incoming’ tab to see all your updates right upon opening the app (a pretty neat UX function).
Overall, Paper is great for teams that want to get ideas together rich in media, discuss those ideas through comments efficiently, and stay up to date on any developments amongst numerous files in their team folders. It offers a neat, minimalist UI to lessen clutter-laden tools. However, it doesn’t cater well to teams that are used to Word and collaborate to export production ready Word documents (for example, collaboration on research papers, legal documents, school papers etc.). People might prefer a more integrated experience like what Docs has with Drive in contrast to Paper being disintegrated from your actual Dropbox folders and files.
Paper is definitely bringing a new trend to team collaboration on documents with a sharp focus on content and getting things done on the cloud in a frictionless manner. Looking forward to their take on Powerpoint and Excel collaboration! :)
