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The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile, Part 2

tech.dropbox.com

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Re: The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile, Part 2

#3
Fascinating stuff, but was this a problem in need of a solution? Was Dropbox seeing that many issues with people running the install on their local machine? Were they able to differentiate between those who felt the install was a hassle versus those who simply opted to not install it?

Re: The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile, Part 2

#4

Fascinating stuff, but was this a problem in need of a solution? Was Dropbox seeing that many issues with people running the install on their local machine? Were they able to differentiate between those who felt the install was a hassle versus those who simply opted to not install it?

There are a lot of places that we were seeing users drop off the radar when trying to install. Through a combination of logging analytics and user studies we figured out what the main problems were and designed this flow to solve them. (See my post from last week for more context on why we built this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8168792)

Re: The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile, Part 2

#7
post #6

I typically set my browser to clear cookies every session. Is there any provision for such a scenario? The authentication flow seems to suggest that if the browser was closed and cookies cleared, the user would not be allowed to install Dropbox.

> If any of our conditions isn’t met, we abort auto sign-in and ask the user to log in with an email and password.

In this case, the install succeeds and only auto sign-in fails.

Re: The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile, Part 2

#8
post #6

I typically set my browser to clear cookies every session. Is there any provision for such a scenario? The authentication flow seems to suggest that if the browser was closed and cookies cleared, the user would not be allowed to install Dropbox.

The ultimate fallback always is to revert to letting user sign in manually. Installation success doesn't depend on cookies, so that should be just fine.
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