Easing the stress of adding members to a Dropbox team, or not

At Dropbox, sharing files and folders and adding team licenses are intertwined and drive revenue more than any other factor. With more than 500,000 teams globally using Dropbox for teams, there are myriad opportunities to convert free users to paid users on these surfaces, but adding people to teams was a convoluted process.

Adding to teams was equally problematic and overwhelming for team admins. What looked like positive results for Dropbox had a completely different flavor for admins, who were flooded with spammy requests to join their teams, driving requests from 20k to 70k requests to join annually.

Design principles I brought to this project:
• Reduce customer confusion
• Provide transparent next steps
• Ensure high quality UX to eliminate existing deceptive patterns

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  • I needed to make improvements to the flow to:
    • Reduce customer confusion
    • Ensure high quality join requests to reduce the risk of creating deceptive patterns for admin and recipients
    • Provide clear value props for joining a team
    •Make sure there are very transparent next steps
    •Drive better quality requests to join
    •Mitigate negative customer feedback by bringing more clarity to users as to whether to request to join

  • Here’s how I did it:

    • Created a complete redesign of the request to join screens
    • Explained to recipients they’re seeing this prompt and why they should or shouldn’t join the team
    • Revealed the file the recipient would be receiving
    • Provided clear value props to help recipients make an informed decision to upgrade or continue on to just that document

  • These updates resulted in less friction and a better experience for all.

    • 66% fewer requests to join, meaning we had a much higher admin approval rate
    • Admin approval rate increased by 72%
    • Our annualized revenue stayed steady at $3.9M
    • Trial teams tend to have a higher license conversion, which translated to a $1m win in gross net annual recurring revenue

For a full walkthrough of this redesign, reach out to me at nico@nicomk.design.