Redesign of the Dropbox homepage to highlight teams and new products
Role
Design Director
Date
2024
Context
The Dropbox business and product strategy had changed significantly since the last major update of the homepage in 2020. We set out to give the Homepage a visual facelift along with a new content strategy to better connect with our target customers. Technical constraints limited our work to just the homepage rather than a system-wide update of the logged out website. This project was proposed and run by the Growth design team.
Led by myself and Paolo Ertreo with design by Chase Tangney and Mike Chu, content strategy by Alexandra Brown, and content writing by Otis Rubottom.
Goal
Improve sign-up conversion for both free and paid customers
Developing a customer-first content strategy
The homepage is the place to keep it simple. Instead of trying to talk to everyone about everything we offer, we were selective. We focused on a specific audience to showcase a select few core offerings to support our broader story around the value Dropbox brings its users beyond file sync and share.
Direction was informed by growth leadership and myself but driven by Alexandra Brown on our Brand team with support from Product Marketing.
Learning from our history — media works
Over the years the Dropbox homepage has gone through many evolutions dependent on the strategy, brand, and goals of the business. As we kicked off the project we wanted to ensure we understood lessons from the past about what worked and what was open to evolve.
Anytime we introduced media, including more videos and product demos, customers were happier. We made it a point to incorporate clear, vibrant visuals throughout the site to tell a compelling story and drive sign ups.
Above video
Scrolling prototype of a direction I designed for our user testing.
Divergent exploration and testing
With a clear content strategy in the works and some principles about how to explore, we began an extensive exploration of design directions. We narrowed 50+ directions into 3 prototypes to test with customers.
I provided creative direction while designs were done by Chase Tangney, Mike Chu, and myself.
Evolving animations and scrolling
Adopting modern frontend technologies as part of the rebuild we were able to customize animations and scroll techniques.
Chase Tangney worked closely with our frontend engineering team to refine animations.
Results*
*Actual values cannot be shared for business privacy
+230K
New web sign ups per year
+57K
New mobile sign ups per year
~$1M
Revenue growth derived from new sign up volume