This blog is the story of how Transfer was built from the point of view of its lead engineer, from prototyping and testing to production.Īs software engineers, we’re used to optimizing. Listening to the voices of people around us (whether Dropbox users or not) helped us break away from preconceived notions based on what is easy and incremental to build on top of the Dropbox stack. And unlike sharing use cases where link persistence is the expected default, with sending cases many people prefer the option of ephemeral expiring links and password protection, increasing the security of confidential content and allowing a “send and forget” workflow.īecause of these differences we chose to build an entirely new product to solve these sending needs, rather than overcomplicating our existing sharing features. This led us to provide the sender with a dashboard of statistics about downloads and views, prompting them to follow up with their recipient if the files are not retrieved. For file transfers, it’s really helpful to get a notification when a recipient has downloaded their files. The more we dug into it, the more we realized that file sharing and file sending have very different use cases and needs. This feature, however, can become a hassle in cases where you want to send a read-only snapshot of a file instead of a live-updating link. And one of the benefits of a shared link is that it’s always connected to the current version of the file. If you are just one large video file away from being over quota, sending that file presents a challenge. For instance, with a shared link, the content needs to be inside your Dropbox folder, which affects your storage quota. You could already do most of this with a Dropbox shared link, but what you couldn’t do before Transfer turned out to be significant for many of our users.
Transfer lets Dropbox users quickly send large files, and confirm receipt, even if the recipient isn’t a Dropbox user. One such complaint, in fact, led to a new product now available to all our users called Dropbox Transfer. Our colleagues who do user research help by regularly reminding us of the customer’s perspective, but so can our friends and family when they complain that product experiences aren’t as simple as they could be. One of the challenges of application engineering within an established company like Dropbox is to break out of the cycle of incremental improvements and look at a problem fresh.
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