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Forum Discussion
UX feedback about "Join Folder" button when clicking on a shared link
As I share links (created via OS folder view) to customers, i have had several of them clicking "Join Folder" as they think that is the priority way of dealing with the link they received. My purpose has been to share a link that multiple users can access - if I have the need to give full read/write access to a user (aka "join folder") - I would give that permission in the first place.
This leads to two questions:
1) Why is the "Join Folder" -button so highlighted when user enters via normal link, instead of it being either "copy to dropbox" or "download"? (buttons shown to users could be filtered based on the link user uses to access the folder).
2) Would the "Join Folder" button be even needed IF the link shared is created with a method "who ever has this link can read the files and copy them"?
This leads to a conclusion, that maybe Dropbox should filter the buttons out based on the link user uses to access the folder.
Why this error happens on a user: To me understanding, it happens because a) the button is highlighted blue and they just click it by heart without reading what the buttons actually state, or 2) they do not understand what "join folder" means - as it really does not indicate in any way, that user is actually requesting full read/write access to a folder, 3) or both reasons -> they do not understand the button text and believe it is the right one as it is highlighted.
If the button must exist, I would 1) change the button order and put it to be the last option, 2) rename it to (something like):
- Request Ownership
- Full Access
- Authorize
Now it just reminds too much of "joining the folder to see the files".
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- This issue has cause significant communication time with external clients for us. The âJoin Folderâ button is even more prominent on mobile. Iâll be looking at other file sharing alternatives if this issue doesnât get resolved soon since itâs costing us too much time.
It seems this is not bulletproof at all.
I shared a link (via OS folder structure) to a customer, who gave the link forward to other people that participated the event.
Now I get this kind of message to my email:
And when I tried the link on the above message, I get this kind of pop-up.
Really. What?! The link I provided does not bring the user to this kind of view - how come they end on such? And how can we prevent that?
The link I provided has read-access to the image folder.Here is a screenshot of the default settings I have:
Why are we suddenly, after so many years of no-issues, having trouble on the most basic tasks of the whole system - we do try use this professionally!... :o
A bit more research.
It seems that this is the view users get:First of all, thanks for changing "join folder" to "copy to dropbox". That is much much better UX than what it was before. But..
Please do not use this part of the dropbox-service as a marketing spot for Dropbox.
1st: "Copy to Dropbox" is not the primary method for distributing files (at least to my knowledge). "Download" logically would be (unless you have a monopoly over cloud services and therefor most of users are also dropbox users - in that case this would be acceptable). I bet if you look at your statistics, download button is much more used than "copy to dropbox".
We are paying money to have a service which we can use to easily distribute files (images in this case) to our customers. Those customers are not necessarily your customers - but they are customers that deserve the easiest and most understandable method of getting the files we need to distribute to them, therefor, please highlight Download, and move that as the primary option.2nd: The users who are Dropbox users already, they will "copy to dropbox" if they need to do that. They know how it works and they can make the choice easily. They also know to look for "copy to dropbox" option.
Non-dropbox-users won't and this gets them mixed up - as we can clearly see.
