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Thoughts and feedback on the new release of Dropbox Paper
This idea was already suggested many years ago and closed for inactivity. The old Dropbox Paper was easy to use, simple and was "what you see is what you get". The new Dropbox Paper introduces lots of new concepts that don't necessarily align I think with how many people have used Dropbox Paper in the past. It could just be me, but seems unlikely. Paper was a useful tool for me to organize my thoughts, write notes, journal ideas, etc... I don't usually like tools in general that try to push me to organize my life into someone else's perspective of how one should operate. I realize that other users may like that, I don't. I don't want "to-dos", "alerts", "notifications", "channels", etc... I like the "sharing" capability, and perhaps some very basic "collaboration", but to turn Dropbox Paper into a complete "Team" solution for ideating is way way beyond what I want to use it for, and I feel a little like the new version of Paper is intended to force users into a way of journaling and writing that maybe isn't what or how they are comfortable operating. Maybe these features could be useful, but on an as-needed basis, without taking away the simplicity that existed prior. It would be great if we could just have something that gives us the old Paper capabilities, with the advantage of treating a "Paper" document just like a dropbox document (which is what I thought the new implementation was all about and I was excited for). Here's the new Dropbox Paper UI. How is this intuitive? "Sections" on the left. "Create new doc" on the main page. Shouldn't I be navigating documents on the left, and each document have sections? Where am I right now? Where are all my paper documents? How do I get to them? What is a section? When I click on "My first section", nothing happens, it doesn't go anywhere. "Brainstorm: Add a topic". What's a topic? I don't brainstorm in Dropbox paper, why is that important? How would you then browse topics? Or is topics part of brainstorming? Is that a document or a "thing" thing in the new Paper application. Do the icons mean each thing on the left is a type of thing, or is it just a clever emoji you can prefix your titles with. What is "Starred" for? If I have 1000 paper documents, why am I starring them like that? Or should it just be maybe "Recent documents". Is "Starred" going to be a new virtual directory tree or a list of starred documents. I feel like it's a bit of a mess of ideas and concepts and terminology. Besides "Create new doc", nothing else makes sense to me. Maybe I am the wrong user. Maybe it was never intended to be used as a simple repository of notes, journals, etc... What's the grand old vision for Paper? Where is it heading and trying to take us as users? I really don't know how to suggest a better idea without a better understanding of what Dropbox Paper is meant to accomplish for users going forward. Is it for the enterprise going forward? Who is Dropbox Paper trying to compete with, because I thought it was pretty unique before in its simplicity. I noticed there's a slack integration? Is the product management group for the application taking their cues from businesses, or are this going to also still be for regular retail-ish consumers. Maybe that can be explained clearly. And then I can decide if it's for me or not, but as-is, I'm not sure how this is going to work for me.
