Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Dropbox Dark Pattern

Nick Heer:

While the biggest tech CEOs testifying before some of the dumbest people are stymied by WebEx problems, I want to direct your attention to this Dropbox screen. Would you assume that both of these buttons are tappable?

Tyler Hall:

No way that button would fly without a name brand company behind it.

Previously:

Update (2020-07-30): Dropbox says this was an unintentional result of a bug related to iOS 14.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

See Dropbox’s response: https://twitter.com/benjkowalski/status/1288655175645712384

If the reply is accurate, then this is unfair on Dropbox (which would be a change from normal in my view, but important to note nonetheless).

I just (literally like 5 minutes ago) installed DropBox in a new MBP. The installation made it look like I needed to install the mobile app to complete the setup (they even made it look like I needed to give them my phone number in order to proceed).

Then they wanted me to try some intrusive feature and made the "skip" text link really small. There was no "skip" button next to the "continue" button - it was rather a small text link somewhere at the bottom of the window. Oh and when I unchecked the "let us backup your documents folder" checkmarks the "continue" button simply greyed out.

And then at the and of course the client wanted admin (root) access to the machine. They still haven't fixed this even though everything works fine when you deny that request.

Dropbox is bad. Like really really bad.

I gave up on DropBox when they instituted the device limit. OneDrive has been great for me.

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