I just want to start by saying how grateful I am to be in this room with you all.
There's a lot of people here and as I reflect them like the collection of talent that is
gathered here. I just feel very lucky to be a part of it. So thank you so much for having me
My name's Kurt. I am from Dropbox and
I
Am a design director. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how we have created the conditions of great design
But before I get into any of that just a little bit about my personal story how I got to where I am now
I've taken a bit of a roundabout path
slightly
unconventional
In college
I got a degree in industrial engineering not to be confused with industrial design
My first job out of school was as a flight test engineer for the Air Force
So couldn't be doing something more different than what I'm doing now
But this is the aircraft I worked on it is the b-52 bomber
My responsibility was to test and maintain new technology on this very old aircraft
And I think well, it sounds cool. It sounds like a cool job for me
It was just that it was just a job didn't love it. Didn't hate it
But one thing was especially clear to me. I did not wake up in the morning excited to go to work and
a big fear that I had at the time was
You know
Coming to the end of my career when I'm 60 years old looking back on my life and realizing I had not
Spent time on something. I was passionate about or truly cared about and
You know work is such a huge huge part of your life
Was not okay with this kind of status quo of trading away one third of your life to work
one third of your life to sleep and
Then the small other one-third that happens on nights and weekends is the life that you enjoy live
I was like that's bullshit. I am not subscribing to that philosophy
so it was
that was like a good indication that was time for a change and I was like now what I felt quite lost and
I looked at the tech industry as something that was really
fascinating exciting from the outside looking in and I just saw that it was rapidly changing and having a huge impact on the world and
I was like, I'm gonna go be part of that. Whatever that means
So I do consider myself a late bloomer but fast learner in design
the first time I opened up a design to was 23 years old Photoshop and
I had to do it because I had to build something from nothing. I had no marketable skills. I was like, all right
I'm just gonna brute-force this and try and like do the startup thing, I guess
so
That's I quit my job, very naively without much of a plan and over the course of the next two years
It was a pretty wild journey
This is a photo of me in the back of a car
Part of my journey, I won't go into super detail here. This could be a whole talk in itself, but
When I first moved to San Francisco, I could only afford to do it by living out of my car. My total expenses were
about two hundred fifty dollars a month, so
ink magazine wrote a nice article about it, but it was just like part of my journey to
kind of like break into tech and
What I found through this experience
I continued to build and ship a lot of stuff with the aspiration that I would still build a company
I found that I was not actually passionate about being an entrepreneur
I was passionate about design and I was looking for a way to like
block out all the other noise that comes with trying to be an entrepreneur so found a way to hustle my
Feet into a design agency down south South Bay that's called ZURB
It was kind of like design wonderland we use design to Sun it to solve a ton of different problems
My friend was then starting a company called ship. Sorry Matias. We dropped the bow as well
Yeah
It was a roller coaster. I joined when there was ten people I helped
The design team and we grew in total to 250 people in just two years
And that pretty much brings me to today where I work at Dropbox. I've been at Dropbox for about two years and
The reason why I wanted to just share that like quick story was that there's not one
Right way to go about like being a designer breaking design
I think often people like say like
Oh Like first I need to go to design school or I need to work at company a B and C and then I'll be successful
So anyways, that was just my path. I just wanted to
Kind of give you a quick snapshot of that. So now we can actually talk about the real stuff. I
Lead a design team that works on a product called Dropbox paper. How many of you have heard of paper?
Ok, how many of you use paper? Okay, we're doing all right, then. I still got some work to do
But for those of you that might not be familiar
Paper is a collaborative workspace that helps teams
Create and share ideas. We release the product a little over a year ago and
When we came out of beta we made a short video to help tell the product story
Do we have sound
You
Just imagine some crazy amazing voiceover right now, it's happening
All right, let's do it we made a short video to tell the product story
It's about people
Working together in a more human and connected way
Because that's how people grow the best ideas
That's paper from Dropbox
It's just what's needed
To keep everything moving
Everyone adding and creating together
from wherever they are
It's staying connected and keeping each other going
With comments that feel like conversations
Or fist bumps or whatever that one is
So that an idea
Can inspire an image
It sparks a look and feel
And even more ideas about music
Emotion
And color
that all make an idea
into an even better version of itself
That's why we made paper
because when people work together
In a more human and connected way
They grow better ideas
From Dropbox you
This is a piece of paper
And we really do use physical paper as
Continued inspiration for the product the pitch to Drew house in our CEO was all about taking inspiration from the physical page
But making it digital
physical paper paper can be
Incredibly flexible it is
Disposable or permanent formal or informal you can use it for writing
collaging drawing painting
It's flexible enough to take on ideas of all kinds and we want our paper Dropbox paper to be equally flexible and inspiring
So while we have designed paper to be this incredibly flexible workspace
We have noticed a few trends and how it's used. Our biggest advocates are
creatives they're designers musicians artists
Steve Aoki who's a musician used paper to create his newest album colony
fashion designer Dion Lee and his team used paper when creating new fashion collections and
John Bernie Chia, he's a filmmaker and producer
He uses paper to plan the Sundance Film Festival as well as a place to imagine new films of zone
so I just want to give you a quick overview of what paper is so
You have an understanding as I use it to illustrate a few points throughout so let's get into it
Let's talk about how we on the paper team have created the conditions for great design
Really? I'm going to focus on three primary themes. The first of which is to build a team that cares
This is the paper design team
- a few folks, we've grown a little bit. It is made up of product designers design researchers and UX writers
However, however, the whole paper team looks something more like this
There's about 80 of us in total across engineering product management marketing
analytics and
one thing that has felt very special about the team of people that we have assembled is
the depth of care that we have for paper
so
Care
build a team that cares but one thing I want to be especially clear about is I am NOT saying
build a team that cares about design that to me is arrogant and
Unfair to ask of your team you as a designer are not entitled to have everyone care about design
Instead what I'm suggesting is that you care about the product
The product is objectively what matters it's the thing that is
built and is what ships it's the thing that people use and find value in and
ultimately, it's the thing that
Great design is affecting so this might sound quite obvious and maybe trivial of course care about the product
But the type of care that I am talking about is like real genuine
Authentic care the kind of is heartfelt and deep and I actually think that's quite rare to find across an entire team
So how have we done it on the paper team? I really think that it can be distilled down to
One kind of like thing that we have really invested a lot into and that's to create a sense of ownership across the team
When you feel personally connected to what you build you tend to care more about it
So how have we done that a few very tactical things? The first is called hacky hour. It happens twice as sprints
Which is once every three weeks we gathered together in a room and we build whatever we want
Anyone who has an idea I can grab an engineer and build it
so it really like speaks to the culture of like having ideas come from the bottom up and when you're contributing your own ideas into
The product directly into the product it gives you this this sense of ownership over it
to build on that point we
Tend to encourage lots and lots of experimentation. So for experiments that are larger in scope
We allow anyone to build and ship to a small team of people that call the composer team. It's made up of about
150 people who work at Dropbox but it's a way to build something real and ship it
So this is a screenshot of our experiment panel inside a paper
There's where the composer team lives. I'm part of the composer team
I can come in here and toggle on and off any experiment. I've lured the experiments because they might just blow your mind
But it is real it is a real thing that we do
cool
Another way that we have built on the design team a strong sense of ownership outside of design is we practice what is called participatory?
Design, meaning we pull other disciplines into our design process
This is a photo it was taken a few weeks ago. We're in the process of rethinking our onboarding into paper and
We got together with engineers
PMS
Researchers writers and we had a generative like brainstorming session. Well you see on the wall is our existing flow
we called it like our
Subway, because we like mapped out the user flow with yarn the past that they could take
But what this allowed us to do was to get the entire team bought in super early
this is before we ever like touched a design tool and
Contributing to the direction that we take things
finally
I've noticed that when your work matters to the company you work for
You tend to care more
so paper has been a top company goal at Dropbox for the last two years in 2017, and now this year and
I think when you're up against a very aspirational goal for the company
It tends to bond the team together and create this collective sense of ownership. So
There goes the rocket
Cool so build a team that cares check
The next theme is around
Being opinionated be opinionated with your designs
This is Microsoft Word it is the godfather of the word processor
It's design has
informed almost every text editor that would come after it and it was the first version was built a
little over 30 years ago and
Word was fundamentally designed for the printed page. There is literally a piece of paper inside of the interface and
This is word from today
what you saw just the screen before was a screenshot from ten years ago and
It's held true to this design
Very very little has changed about the approach to the design of word
But over the course of 30 years the way that people have worked has dramatically changed and
Even tools that were built for online use and intended to be collaborative are sticking to this design of the past
This is just my moment to throw a little shade at our friends at Google
So what do we start with on paper
you
We started with truly a blank canvas. We wanted to think from first principles
around what a tool would look like built for modern-day collaboration and
What we designed doesn't actually look a whole lot different than that blank canvas on the surface
It's very simple, but it is able to unfold around you as you work into almost endless possibilities
This is a strong opinion. We hold on the paper design team
We believe that your tools should mold around you personally rather than you needing to mold around your tools. So
Be opinionated we have a strong opinion
But put a bunch of opinionated people together in a room and ask them to make decisions and things become quite difficult
so in order to
Help with that we of course created design principles. I was here yesterday and I caught a
few talks, and I think every single presenter had the word principle in their
in their presentation, so this is nothing new but I
Feel like teams often write principles stick them on a shelf said we did it and let them gather dust
So what I want to share with you is how we have specifically
Put our principles into practice
Because the hard part is actually living your principles. So our first principle is confidence through clarity
we believe that people do their best work when they're confident and
Confidence comes when things are clear to you
Here's how we have designed for clarity and the product the first thing that you'll see is our editor attribution
You can clearly see who has contributed to each piece of a doc
Another example of designing for clarity is our annotations feature
So if you drop in an image
We allow you to annotate a specific part of it. If you've ever tried to give design feedback over email or written text
It's it's quite difficult. So this allows you to be like specific and actionable in your feedback
Principle number two flow through focus, we believe that your best creative thinking happens when your focus it almost
Allows you to enter like a state of flow someone yesterday
I forget who was talking about this state of flow and it is something that we designed for
So again on the surface very very simple. You won't see any
Overly exposed formatting menus or features really?
But the way that we have approached this is that we give you the things you need in the moments you need them
So a couple examples
Are formatting menu only appears when you highlight text indicating you want to interact with it
And better yet, we support markdown so you don't need a formatting menu at all. He never need to leave the keyboard
Similarly with our table of contents as you're composing and building a dock we are automatically inserting these tick marks along the
left edge
Upon hover, we expose the table of contents allowing you to navigate to a different part of the dock
But by default we're getting out of your way
We took another approach when you copy and paste links into the canvas we can
often recognize that there is a piece of content associated with that link and
We automatically expand it and allow you to interact with that content inside of the dock
So here you dropped in a youtube link, you can play the video
Similar you have a Pinterest board. You just paste the Pinterest link in
SoundCloud
Envisions so you can put an envisioned prototype in and actually like click the prototype with ever without ever leaving the paper canvas
And we do the same thing with framer
Last thing for designing for focus. This is one of my
favorite features from like a standpoint of cleverness
we allow you to turn your dock into a
presentable artifact in a single click of a button so
Here's a quick demonstration of that so
click present and
We open in a new tab
We even if you want to be provocative if we let you go into dark mode scary
But essentially what this gives you is
Slides we increase the size of the content. We remove the user interface
Really creating that focused experience for you to tell your story
Alright principle number three
creativity through play we believe people are people regardless if they're at work or not and
People like to have fun. I don't think you need to be this dark cold rigid version of like what people often identify as
Professional so here's a few ways that we have allowed people to be their most creative selves through Play
The first kind of simple thing is we have
Integrated animated stickers into our comments. It allows you to express and emote as you would in real life
And we really do love our stickers. This is our paper wizard
He has become almost like a mascot for the team
Because he embodies so much of the character that we strive to have in the product
Every time you start a new dock. We write a little clever message just for you a couple examples
Give me a name now write something brilliant
The trees thank you for creating this dock
You are a shining star you are a tiny masterpiece
Everyone loves emoji. So do we and
An example of how we have taken this in
To like a playful forum is whenever you insert emoji into the document title
We also insert it into the browser tab
So it actually there's some utility it helps with wayfinding if you have a ton of tabs open
Or you could just do stupid shit like have a zoo and your browser. I don't know
Cool we also have a handful of Easter eggs hidden throughout the product. There's actually quite a lot
If you remember the old school Nokia cell phones. They're like the brick phones. It was my first cell phone
It came default with one game. I think it was snake. So we have recreated our emoji snake inside of paper
Buy me a beer sometime and I'll tell you how to find it. Otherwise, you can click around randomly until something happens
I don't I don't know
secrets
Cool fourth and final principle of of our team and how we have acted on them is teamwork through trust
we believe the best teams operate with inherent trust with one another and
A couple examples of that is our shared to do feature. So
At any point in time you can ask a teammate to do a task for you and your teammates can do the same to you
Additionally, when you go to share a dock we default to edit permissions, we think that the best teams are co-creating together
So that's it be opinionated that's kind of like how we have
acted on our opinion and ensured that the opinion was coming from the collective team not just like one-off opinions the
The third kind of theme and this one will be shorter, but it's to put people at the center
This is probably not something new like talk to users I say people I think users is a little like dehumanizing
There's just like people using the products. They're not users. I don't know
but talk to people all the time and
We really do do this on paper a lot of times
It's like a kind of like a mantra but people don't often do it a couple examples. We're very lucky to have a
supremely talented design research team on paper
So we do traditional kind of like more formal research studies as an example. This is
us going on sites and
Getting a deeper understanding of a team's creative workflow
We took a participatory approach with this as well where the people were
Demonstrating how they work with their team throughout a given day
in this study the
People or the animals you can see like the elephant represented the person's teammates and the modes of transportation
So the school bus and bulldozer were the tools that they were using
In a much more casual way we also do weekly customer chats so anyone on the team is empowered to
Schedule a chat. They just reach out to a customer say hey
We'd love to talk to you for like an hour a lot of times we do this over
Videoconference, but it allows us to simply have conversations and keep our customers or people at the top of our mind
So we're not like designing for ourselves
We do sometimes go on site. This was in Australia, and we went into a design agency
They're called present company and they showed us their Docs that they have been creating there. Beautiful is very inspiring
But it's also a good opportunity for
Our people to tell us why the product sucks and what they need and where it's kind of like where we're dropping the ball
The
third thing that we do that feels pretty unique to
Our team is something we call real world Wednesday's this happens bi-weekly. We bring in about five to ten participants
to test super super early concepts
Sometimes it's literally like we print off two mock-ups and like put them in front of people and just have a conversation about it
The way we did we had designed this session is in this case. There is five participants
It's done speed-dating style. So they're very very rapid kind of like concept test. We do fifteen minutes and then the participants
Stands up and goes to another station to test another concept
That's all I have to share with you today
This is how we have created the conditions for great design the paper team
and
just to recap and summarize build a team that deeply cares about the product a very strong opinion about your approach to design and
Put people at the center of what you do
I am super bummed that I cannot come to the after party. I would love to chat with you more
But you can reach me online at Twitter. It's at Kurt Varner. Thank you so so much for having me
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