Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Box.net UI Makeover for a Simpler, Sexier User Experience

By

Here at Box, we truly believe that sharing should be simple, and we’re constantly listening to feedback from our users on ways to make Box even easier to use. We see simplicity as a pretty powerful edge over traditional enterprise software solutions, which are typically feature-bloated and require heavy IT intervention and maintenance. To this end, we’re happy to share that we’ve made a series of incremental but awesome improvements to the Box UI, designed to keep our users happy and in control.

The first change we’ve rolled out is a makeover of our menu items at the folder and file level. It’s no secret that our feature set has grown considerably over the past year to include functionalities like previewing, file locking, tasks and much more. Our refreshed menus put all those options at your fingertips without extra clutter, making it easy to find the action you’re looking for. You can also open document preview pages and folders in new browser tabs by simply right-clicking on any item to find the new ‘open in new tab’ option.

Another improvement inspired by our conversations with users is an update to items in the Pending Items Manager. We’ve seen significant adoption of our tasks functionality, and the ‘Pending Items Manager’ (found at the upper-right of the All Files and Updates pages) is a great way to keep track of all the tasks that have been assigned to you as well as those you have assigned out. For additional details on any task, you can now just hover over the item to see an instant description, any collaborators who have yet to complete the task, and date the task was assigned. You can even send reminders or cancel a task directly from the Pending Items Manager.

Finally, we’ve introduced easier collaborator management from within your folders. Place your cursor over any collaborator’s name to see their email address and other important information. You can send the collaborator a note right from the pop-up just by clicking the ‘email’ link, or view his or her entire profile with just one click. Even more exciting, you can now see the user’s most recent activity in the folder and, if you’re the folder owner, you can manage your collaborator’s access settings – or even remove them from the folder entirely.

All of these changes were designed to make your Box experience simpler and more powerful. Have ideas for new features? Comment here!

Post by Brandon Savage, Sr. Product Manager

Showing 5 comments

j.westin September 28th, 2010

This is great!
Please integrate with Autodesk’s Project Butterfly or make an app for this. Will be great to use this application inside of Box.net.

ashley September 29th, 2010

Thanks! We’ll look into it :)

David Betz October 3rd, 2010

As long as you finally get with the times and get a nice HTML5 (e.g. Gmail) upload to replace that dead-ancient-pain-in-the-butt Java antique, it’s all good.

mark October 4th, 2010

Hey David,

We currently support drag and drop for HTML 5 enabled browsers. You can read about it in our post here: http://blog.box.net/2010/05/28/drag-and-drop-it-like-its-hot-powered-by-html5/
We’re always looking for ways to improve Box, so thanks a lot for the feedback!

John D. Wilson November 7th, 2010

We’re currently evaluating shared file management / collaboration options. The weak point with Box is the lack of a strong tagging system. We’d like something like what google docs offers – the barely known feature that documents can be “stored” in more than one folder – but edits apply everywhere.

We have documents that are shared across multiple projects. Right now we have to ship around the latest version but it would be a lot easier to be able to have all project-related documents in one place, even if they are used to support more than one project.

This is particularly important when we share with non-staff project collaborators. We can’t give them access to our central shared files, but we could share a project folder with them … if the folder had everything in it, that would be desirable.

And I know you’ve got tags – but for a lot of reasons, not so much.