Google drive ux redesign reserach

Midterm Project - ISE/COMP 217

GOOGLE DRIVE UX REDESIGN Animesh Tripathi User Experience Grad 1st Semester Project

Team Nirvana (Meet DavĂŠ, Leonard Hung, Andy Le, Animesh Tripathi) - Fall 2015

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Table of Contents

Introduction and Product Selection ....................................................................... 1 Product Description ...................................................................................................... 2 Features Evaluated ....................................................................................................... 3 Usability Criteria for Product Evaluation ............................................................ 5 Comparative Study ........................................................................................................ 7 Comparing Heuristic Principle ................................................................................. 9 Personas ......................................................................................................................... 11 Tools ................................................................................................................................. 17 Techniques .................................................................................................................... 17 Usability criteria and metrics ................................................................................ 19 Suggested Usability Enhancements .................................................................... 22 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 23 What was learned from this project ................................................................... 24 References ..................................................................................................................... 25 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 26

THIS IS AN ACADEMIC REPORT

Midterm Project - ISE/COMP 217

Introduction and Product Selection Google Drive was originally introduced in 2012 as “a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. … You can upload and access all of your files, including

BUSINESS USERS

videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond” (Pichai, 2012). Since then, Google Drive has been widely adopted by large businesses and individual consumers alike, with more than 240 million active users as of October 2014 (Protalinski, 2014).

Subject for this project because each team member had real-life experiences with using the product – enough to realize that some aspects of the interface work quite well (and other aspects less so), but not quite enough to pinpoint why certain features might work well or poorly. By conducting an in-depth evaluation, our team would be able to gain significantly more insight about Google Drive’s usability.

REGULAR USERS

It should also be noted that for the sake of consistency (in terms of access, criteria, and efficiency of comparative studies), this usability study was mostly limited to the web version of the Google Drive service.

Team Nirvana (Meet Davé, Leonard Hung, Andy Le, Animesh Tripathi) - Fall 2015

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Product Description Google Drive is a cloud storage service developed and maintained by Google. It allows users to upload files from their desktop and mobile devices, edit documents via Google Docs and third party web applications that are available through the Chrome App Store, and share and collaborate on content with other Upload

users. Along with the web service, Google Drive is also available as a desktop client for Windows and OS X based operating systems, and as a native app for Android and iOS platforms.

While originally written in Python, Google provides developers with a variety of APIs, allowing them to integrate the service with Webbased (Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, .Net, Python, Node.js, Go), Android, and iOS applications (Google Developers website, 2015).

Google Drive provides 15 GB of free storage space (shared among other Google services such as Gmail and Photos). The amount of free storage space is quite substantial when

Create

Collaborate

compared to competitors such as Box and Dropbox, who provide 10 GB and 2 GB

Share

respectively. Google Drive also offers monthly paid subscriptions for additional storage space, ranging from 100 GB to 30 TB.

Features Evaluated When Google Drive was made available in 2012, some of its most promoted features were the ability to create and collaborate on content, the ability to store files securely and access them from any device, access to detailed search options, and a multitude of other features that were still being added at the time (Pichai, 2012).

Upload

Since it would be impractical to comprehensively evaluate every feature in Google Drive, our team chose to focus attention on

• Share

Uploading files and folders (using

either drag and drop, menu from “New” button, or file directory) •

Sharing files and folders with other

people (using multiple options and access settings available)

Organize

•

Organizing files and folders

(Renaming, copying, deleting, moving to new folders, etc.)

Drag

‘n

Drop

•

Drag and Drop manipulation (method

for uploading and moving files) •

Accessing/uploading/downloading

files from different devices

Figure 1. Screenshot of typical Google Drive screen, showing use of drag-anddrop manipulation to upload a file to a folder. Sharing and organizing options are also accessible from this screen (although possibly not immediately apparent) Tasks Based on the features discussed above and our own usage of the application, our top five user tasks for Google Drive are to

•

Upload new files/folders to (or create new files in) the My Drive folder,

•

Organize (move, duplicate, rename, delete, etc.) existing files/folders

•

Share files and folders with other people, utilizing a variety of possible access privileges

•

Download files/folders to the device that Google Drive is being accessed from

•

Access/upload/share/download files using a mobile device, when the traditional web app is not available

Generally, the functionality offered by Google Drive is about equal to the tasks the user wants to do (however, different users will likely have different tasks and preferences, as discussed in User Profiling later in the report).

Usability Criteria for Product Evaluation The main usability criteria focused on in this evaluation were •

Affordances: Indications perceived by

the user that inform the user about what actions Affordances

can be performed •

Learnability: How easily users can

notice and figure out how to use a particular feature “without it being more trouble than it’s Learnability

worth” •

(Krug, 2014) Consistency: Among UI elements

(e.g., similar-looking UI elements behave in a similar manner), and across page layouts (e.g., Consistency

certain features always available) •

Error message clarity: How well the

system explains errors (causes of error, possible Error message clarity

solutions, etc.) to the user Each of these criteria addresses some part of the overall user experience; the effectiveness of affordances and learnability determines whether a user knows about a feature’s

existence (and if so, how to use the feature correctly), consistency and feedback/transparency help to reduce any confusion the user might have, and the quality of error messages can influence how much the user trusts the system.

These criteria were kept in mind during the initial documentation stage of the evaluation, and later supplemented with data obtained from a questionnaire and several user tests (discussed in more detail in the Techniques and Usability Evaluation sections later in the report).

Comparative Study Shortly after its 2012 release, Google Drive was described as “aiming … at companies and Google Apps users rather than [being] a consumer-facing service a la Dropbox,” and “aimed squarely at enterprise-level storage options such as Box, with the hope that those companies are already using Google Apps

To some extent, this assessment appears to be true; overall, Box is geared more towards business and enterprises, while Dropbox is meant to appeal more to a mainstream audience. Google Drive may have an advantage over Box and Dropbox as far as aggressive pricing is concerned with respect to their existing infrastructure. Google also benefits from the content that the users upload to their personal drives with respect to analytics and personalized ad recommendations.

Table 1. Comparative overview of Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box web apps

Target Audience

Uploading files

Organizing files

Individuals and businesses who work within the Google product ecosystem Upload through “New” button or drag-and-drop *No affordance for drag-and-drop unless current folder is empty

List and grid views available Sorting options: Name, Last Modified, Last Opened

Sharing files

“Share” button opens dialog box with permission controls *Can’t grant different access privilege types in a single dialog box use

General/wider audience (also has separate Business version; not evaluated here) Through Upload button or dragand-drop (but only into an existing folder)

Traditionally targeted towards businesses (only Free version evaluated here) Upload through “Upload” button or drag-and-drop *No affordance for drag-and-drop unless current folder is empty

Files are list view only; only Photos have thumbnail view Sorting options: Name, Date Modified, Shared with, Kind, Document Extension, Size

List and icon views available User can dragand-drop to reorganize, but affordance isn’t clear Sorting options: Name, date, size

Sharing included together with Upload dialog *No access control options besides “Can Edit” for free accounts

“Share” contains many optional advanced settings (presented up front) that may give user greater control

Comparing Heuristic Principle

Most interactable elements are Affordances visually designed to indicate what can be done (click, expand, etc.), except for drag and drop (only shown in empty folders)

Learnability

Consistency

Most interactable elements are visually designed to indicate what can be done, except for drag and drop

Many options are hidden in submenus, but the affordance (arrow) to expand the submenu is easily noticeable

Brief intro available only when user activates account *Many icons must be hovered over to view their function

Brief intro available only Help & description when user text often activates account displayed *Many options are alongside or hidden in within the submenus (extra relevant task step, and being performed increases cognitive load)

Inconsistent behavior among similar-looking icons (e.g. View, Sort, Details, Settings buttons), but they always appear in same place on page

Interface layout and main options are similar to those in Google Drive (easier transition from Drive to Box?) *Many options hidden, but hidden consistently

Some misleading icon metaphors (Events uses a calendar icon, but is actually an activity log)

Feedback & error messages

Other notes

Interface provides feedback upon completion of most actions *Error message clarity is inconsistent

Interface provides feedback upon completion of most actions *Confirmations sometimes fade quickly

15 GB for free version (shared among Gmail & other Google apps) *On mobile, iOS has fewer features available than Android

2 GB for free version Integration options with Microsoft Office, Google Drive

Interface provides feedback upon completion of most actions

10 GB for free version Integration options with Microsoft Office, Google Drive

Table footer

From this comparison, it appeared that

From this comparison, it appeared that Box's UI is the most suitable for enterprise-level collaboration.

Box's UI is the most suitable for enterprise-level collaboration. It was also observed that while the web versions of Dropbox and Box are capable of previewing many documents, they often rely on third-party solutions such as Microsoft Office Online to edit them. On the other hand, Google Drive provides an in-house

Google Drive provides an in-house office suite in the form of Google Docs

office suite in the form of Google Docs. This Google ecosystem extends to mobile devices, with native Google Drive applications for iOS and Android devices possibly providing a more unified experience to its users.

Personas It has been noted that Google Drive is particularly easy to set up for those who already use Google services such as Gmail or the various Google Docs, making it one of the best options for people who are accustomed to working within a Google product system (Mitroff, 2015).

In addition, some of the introductory pages for new users (see Figure 7) seem to be targeted towards people who regularly use multiple devices (especially mobile devices), as noted by the emphasis on having access to important files from any device. Furthermore, in a survey sent out by Google Drive, one section asked users to categorize themselves as using the service primarily for personal, business, or education purposes:

Besides taking the above information into consideration, our team also sent out a questionnaire to assess respondents’ reported usage preferences and levels of satisfaction. Out of 24 responses, it was observed that all the respondents were either full-time students or working full-time, most of the respondents were under the age of 50 (with many being in their 20s), and that the majority of respondents considered uploading and sharing files to be their primary task (followed by editing and downloading files).

One user group that was not represented in the survey was that of younger (e.g. high school) students. A persona for this group would represent the younger generation that is beginning to incorporate file-storage services into their academic work and will likely carry it on into their future. Such a persona might differ from the college student due to not being as skilled. Furthermore, although they would probably not use a paid service to benefit the company directly, they might form a future preference for the company that produced their most used file-storage service of their choice.

John Snow John Snow

Web Developer: Advanced User 28 Years old, Unmarried, BSc in information Technology About John He is a self-motivated worker who is focused on working in Blue Foundation Media as a senior analyst. He is most likely to use a shared drive/cloud for, sharing files with his colleagues ,receive files from his team members to assess their coding.

Regularly using laptop and mobile device to evaluate his work and make adjustments according. Has to used shared drives/cloud services regularly to share files between colleagues. Claims to be an advance user for creating and sharing files.

Lydia Keath Lydia Keath

Aspiring Clinical Psychologist: Intermediate User 21 Years old, Unmarried, 3rd Year Major in Psychology About Lydia Lydia is an above average student (maintains a 3.8 GPA) and is preparing for graduate school aiming to be a professional clinical psychologist. Her shared drive experience involves scanning books and articles and storing them in her drive.

She is often in the library or on the go with her laptop to study the latest topics. Well aware with navigating various research databases to garner research on various subject matters and saving them on a shared drive/cloud for later reference. Claims to be intermediate user.

Ben Reeves

Ben Reeves

High School Student: New User 14 Years old, freshman in high school Ken is an average high schooler who likes to use technology. His main focus for using a flexible sharing service/cloud is to access the many features such as creating documents/ powerpoints, organize group work with his classmates, and uploading assignments for class.

He uses a computer at the library, school, and at home. He is a beginning user who has not explored many of the uses of a sharing service outside of what he is used to.

"Is my group ready to start our work on the project?"

Vasundhara Narayan

Vasundhara Narayan

Director of Finance Indian Railways: Intermediate to advanced user 35 Years old, Married 2 kids supports older parents She has worked for the Indian railways for the last 20 years and has adapted her working style to the younger generations by using shared drive/cloud services. Her main usage of these services are to share files.

She works 9 am to 5 pm, actively moving between meetings and looking for updates from her subordinates. She has just joined a shared drive/cloud service and is a beginner user. To that extent, she uses the service only for her work and not her personal life.

These files need to be checked again.

Tools In order to collect and assess the data for this evaluation, our team used screen capturing software (including Grab and Mac OS X’s default screen capturing feature) to take screenshots of the interface, spreadsheet software (mainly Google Sheets) to organize data points, word processing and note-taking software (Word, Google Docs, Evernote) to take notes and create lists, and also pencil and paper for various notetaking and brainstorming activities.

Additional tools used include Google Forms for creating the online questionnaire (see Techniques below), and recording software (such as QuickTime’s screen recording function) to follow user behavior during some of the observational studies.

Techniques To support the evaluation, our team utilized an online questionnaire (see Appendix, Figure 9) and observational studies of user behavior.

Additionally, team members documented their own experiences of using the application, making notes about issues such as errors Questionnaire

encountered or unexpected steps.

Most of our user studies were conducted either through direct observation (in a partially controlled environment using a set of general user tasks) or indirect observation using screen sharing and recording software. When possible, we also conducted brief semi-structured interviews using a mixture of closed and open questions (usually as a follow-up to some of the Observation

user studies, to clarify or confirm the thought processes behind some of the behaviors that were observed during the study).

Usability criteria and metrics The results of this usability evaluation were informed by team members’ observations from using the interface, comments reported in the questionnaire, and the behaviors and comments observed from user testing.

During user testing, participants were asked to perform 4-5 test tasks in the Google Drive web application, using a shared folder that was accessed from a team member’s laptop (and mobile device, if applicable). The test tasks performed were:

1.

Uploading one file from the desktop to a

Google Drive folder; 2.

Sorting and organizing some of the existing

files and folders; 3.

Sharing a file from the Google Drive folder

with two other people (with View-only permissions for one person and Editing permissions for the other); 4.

Downloading files that were shared with

the Google Drive account; and 5.

Accessing and downloading files from the

Google Drive account using a mobile device.

Participants’ actions and comments were observed, and their completion time for each task (in seconds) was recorded.

From the results of this study, the participants required less time (in seconds) for organizing existing files and folders (M= 60.75, SD= 46.17) and downloading files from a shared folder (M= 27.57, SD= 21.43), compared with time needed for uploading a file from the desktop (M= 82.25, SD= 111.11) and sharing files with other people using different types of access privilege (M= 193.5, SD= 124.01). Based on these results, it is possible that the uploading and sharing processes could be revised in order to increase their usability, and therefore improve the overall usability of the Google Drive web app.

Table 3. Usability findings based on observations, questionnaire, and user studies Team observations

Affordances

Learnability

Consistency

Feedback

Error Messages

Questionnaire comments

User behaviors/comme nts

Reasonable for most elements, except drag-anddrop; affordance doesn’t appear if there are any items stored in the current folder

Multiple users not aware of drag-anddrop functionality (either took more time to notice, or just used other upload/move methods)

Some actions can be completed through different means (but also with different levels of efficiency)

Multiple users considered sharing process to be difficult or unnecessarily complicated (# of steps)

Mention that some options look complex

View, Sort, Details, and Settings buttons have same size & similar appearance (and are grouped together), but behave very differently (inconsistent); however, their location remains consistent regardless of the user’s current screen

Users who frequently had to switch between devices reported satisfaction with having a consistent experience accessing files, regardless of device used

Feedback messages are usually timely and easily noticeable; sometimes seem to fade too quickly, however

“an image i inserted on a slide looked fine on my computer but when I presented it on someone else's computer it showed as just a big X. It gave no feedback as to why this happened.”

Not consistent – some are reasonably clear, but others are vague

Generally dismissed quickly (user slip rather than error?) or not helpful enough to solve the issue

Suggested Usability Enhancements Based on team members’ own experiences

Drag-anddrop be more visible

using Google Drive, information reported on the questionnaire, and information obtained from user testing, our proposed usability enhancements are to include

•

Easy sharing and more streamlined

Affordances for drag-and-drop functionality that are visible (possibly in a smaller or lowercontrast state) even when the current folder is not empty,

•

A version of the sharing dialog box that allows users to grant different types of access privileges (Edit, View only, Comment) among

More organizing capabilities

multiple recipients, all during one dialog box interaction, •

Additional sorting options for organizing files and folders, such as sorting by file type and/or file size, and

Clearer feedback

•

Clearer error messages for certain scenarios In addition, other studies that might be conducted in order to better evaluate the usability of Google Drive might involve features such as confirming that a shared file has been viewed by a particular recipient, and support for more accurate file previews in the Google Drive image viewer.

Conclusion After gathering general information about Google Drive’s web application (e.g., generally targeted towards individuals or businesses that are already familiar with using the Google Apps suite), documenting its main features, comparing it with competing products, defining plausible personas and use cases, sending out a questionnaire, conducting user tests, and assessing the results – all while keeping the criteria of affordances, learnability, consistency, feedback, and error message clarity in mind – our team found that although Google Drive has an overall intuitive and clean design, there are still areas for improvement – in particular with regard to using drag-and-drop for uploading files (increasing the affordance), sharing files with recipients who require different access privileges (decreasing the number of steps needed), and understanding/solving system errors (improving explanations and suggested solutions).

What was learned from this project 1.

Decide and agree upon all main

features/tasks/criteria as early as possible to maintain consistency, but stay flexible enough to accommodate better ideas uncovered later.

2.

Think about as many possible factors

that can influence feature distribution (pricing packages, ability to gather user information, cross-selling opportunities with related products, etc.).

3.

Consider a product’s feature breadth

vs. feature depth: for example, Drive may have wider breadth due to its suite of Google Docs, but Box seems to have much more depth in certain features (e.g. advanced options for sorting and sharing).

4.

Balance questionnaire (survey)

questions between what information is most desired, and what information respondents are comfortable with providing.

5.

Pay close attention during user

testing, in order to be fully confident about strength of results, and to have greater potential to gather rich information.

References Google Developers website – Drive REST API (2015). https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/ Retrieved 2015-10-05.

Krug, Steve (2014). Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Usability. Pearson Education.

McCarty, Brad (2012). “Google Drive – It’s Live and No Dropbox Killer”. The Next Web. http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/24/google-drive-is-liveand-available-right-now-but-its-no-dropbox-killer/ Retrieved 2015-10-05.

Mitroff, Sarah (2015). “OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box: Which cloud storage service is right for you?” CNET. http://www.cnet.com/howto/onedrive-dropbox-google-drive-and-box-which-cloud-storage-service-isright-for-you/ Retrieved 2015-10-05.

Pichai, Sundar (2012). “Introducing Google Drive… yes, really”. Official Google Blog. https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/introducing-google-driveyes-really.html Retrieved 2015-10-05.

Protalinski, Emil (2014). “Google Compute Engine Down by 10%, 240 Million Drive Users”. The Next Web. http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/10/01/google-announces-10-price-cutcompute-engine-instances-google-drive-passed-240m-active-users/ Retrieved 2015-10-05.

Appendix Figure 2. Comparison of drag-and drop file uploading features

Figure 3. Comparison of file sorting options (Left to right: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box)

Figure 4. Comparison of Sharing options’ dialog boxes (Top to bottom: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box)

Figure 5. Examples of (in)consistency between interface elements: The buttons for List/Grid view togglng, Sorting options, Details/Activity, and Settings are grouped together and are each the same size, with a similar visual appearance. However, clicking each button results in a completely different set of behaviors and actions, which may be counterintuitive compared to how the buttons are presented.

However, these four buttons are also available on nearly every screen in Google Drive (except when working with modal dialogs, etc.), meaning that a user can always expect to find them in the same place and position, no matter the task they are currently on.

Figure 6. Examples of error messages in Google Drive (middle image also contains example of feedback in the “Download ready� notification, which in this case links to the error message).

Figure 7. Example of introductory image for new Google Drive users, emphasizing capability of cross-device access by user.