“When it's behavior that they're not sure about, [users] often like to check Dropbox Community to see, ‘Are others experiencing this?’” says Emma Fay, Community Manager at Dropbox. “It basically originated like that, where users were like, ‘Hey, I've noticed that this is different. Is this a bug? Or have you changed this?’ Then, it was escalated to me from our moderator team.”
Clara Wu, Product Manager at Dropbox, recalls seeing the comment from one of the super users who was unsure if it was a bug or if it had been removed.
“Jay was the moderator. He was unsure, too,” says Clara. “So after some investigation, they learned that the time to sync was being replaced by the progress bar. The product team thought the progress bar would be good [because it] can be more accurate than time estimates which tend to be off by a lot. They decided to make a fast, reversible decision to remove [the time to sync feature]. Then, once it rolled out to beta, we saw that lots of people were complaining about it.”
The idea was that the progress bar would be a neater, cleaner, more visual way to track the time left to sync. But as it turns out, users actually wanted to know how many minutes they would have to wait until the sync was complete.
Nikhil Marathe, Software Engineer at Dropbox, reached out to Clara on Slack to ask if she would respond to the post. “My original response was, ‘Hey, we decided to drop the time estimates for the time being,’” Clara recalls. “There are still ways to figure out how much progress your files have made.’ After that message, I saw that there were complaints about it in the [threads on Dropbox Community].”