The EchoUser Experience

Dropbox and the Human Touch

A few months back I got an email from the crew at Dropbox reminding me to use their service.  If you haven’t tried it yet, Dropbox is a neat file syncing service that lets you back stuff up online as well.

Anyway, usually I hate reminders to use a service - I find them intrusive, and the repeat offenders get put on my spam list even if the service/product is actually pretty cool.

But Dropbox’s email actually made me smile:

It’s got three key attributes that make it much less annoying than other reminder emails:

1. It’s visual.

I get it, you want me to use your service. But please don’t show me a long bullet-point list of why you think you rock.  Dropbox gets this, and replaces long text with an image instead.

2. It’s funny.

The picture did actually make me chuckle.  It won’t win any best joke awards on BET and Carlin certainly wouldn’t be impressed, but in my book any laughter is better than none (and certainly better than a groan as I hit Spam). Further, it shows they have balls, which is always a good thing.

3. It’s human.

This is the most important part: the hand drawn image really lets me connect with the company.  Dropbox isn’t just a bunch of faceless programmers shoving their product down my throat - somewhere somebody actually sat down to draw this picture, and that’s a powerful thing.  So powerful that I actually pictured him or her doodling away with their tongue stuck out. Pretty cool.

Even though in the end the email didn’t get me to keep using Dropbox (I honestly don’t have a need for it), it did get me to take the time to write about it, which in the end is almost as good.

When San Francisco banned plastic bags 2 years ago, my whoops of joy could be heard across the Golden Gate in Marin.  Having grown up in the developing world I grew accustomed - sadly - to seeing plastic bags everywhere they shouldn’t be: the streets, clogging drains, polluting rivers, the ocean, even stuck on phone lines. Everywhere except in garbage cans. You can be sure that I for one wasn’t going to miss their absence at all.

So imagine my surprise when last week my local Delano’s bagger put my groceries in one of these:

That’s funny, I could have sworn that plastic bags are illegal in San Francisco. So unless I’m missing something, this shouldn’t be allowed.

On second look, the makers of the bag have done their utmost to convince everyone that this is anything but a plastic bag with the liberal use of clever marketing copy.  Phrases like “no trees were harmed in the making of this bag”, and a cute little “nutrition” box highlighting exactly how it hasn’t hurt trees are nice tries - but belie the fact that eventually this bag will no doubt end up in a dump, where it most certainly will hurt a tree.

I get what the folks behind the bag are getting at: we have so many bags in production already that it certainly makes sense to train people to reuse them, thereby preventing more bags from ending up in landfills. Indeed, these particular bags do seem more durable than their crappy white plastic counterparts, so I could definitely imagine using them for more than one grocery run - but let’s face it: I can count on one hand the number of people I know who bring eco bags to the store every time they go.  Heck, I have 3 such bags in the trunk of my car, and I still manage to forget them each and every time.

As luck would have it, these bags have an answer for our laziness, too - a message nudging us to take them to “participating stores” for recycling. Good idea in principle, until my roommate tried it: turns out our local Delano’s isn’t one of those stores.

Go figure.