Dropbox Hires Rasmus Andersson, Facebook’s Mobile Design Guru | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox Hires Rasmus Andersson, Facebook’s Mobile Design Guru

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76 pointsaashaykumar9224 comments

It seems like they are scoring a lot of really big power players from other great companies. Does it seem like everyone is going there until it goes public for the payout?

Yeah I think that's pretty inferable. Regardless, Drew and company are doing an amazing job getting all this talent--coming IPO or not, these are a lot of power people coming in and they can't have been easy to attain.

It'll be quite the solid team to showcase to investors come IPO time.

But how will the product evolve with that talent?

The sync/sharing/storage aspect of the product is mature given the relative one-dimensionality of file storage.

Storage, Syncing and sharing should be transparent to the users - so clearly, they need to ensure a continued robust, secure service - but one that never gets between a user and their data.

The acquisition of Mailbox is a great move assuming they bolt Mailbox on-top of Dropbox.

What I would like to see is API integrations across services such that I can eventually store all MY data in MY account and allow other services access to it.

This could cause an issue for some services - but the fact is that I don't want to host all my mail with gmail, all my pics in FB, etc...

I want a storage glob and a set structure for "pics go here" "docs go here" "mail goes here" and a range of apps that access the data in an authorized, yet ad-hoc manner - but at the end of the day, the data is MINE.

Now that they've brought in this talent, it's just a matter of time before all those brains start working together--and once this happens, you'll see the product naturally evolve. I don't have any specific ideas as to what it will involve into, though.

I'd like this too and might start work on something over the summer. When you say 'my' data I'm assuming you mean 'remains under my control'.

Some of the ideas have been research topics and may ripe for demos later in the year. If you've got s moment, you can check out perscon.net for an overview.

This is exactly what I was talking about. There are a ton of challenges - and obviously this is against what the market/industry is looking to provide (they want to control the service, and see your data as a part of their service)

But we need to move in this direction and have some balance between the user owning their online experience, especially when that experience is an actual extension of who they are - and services that are able to provide portions of that experience in a way where they can be profitable and viable businesses.

You bring up a good point, which is what I keep wondering too - where do they go? Dropbox already has sync APIs [0] across both iOS and Android (and presumably desktop), which must be their big bet to get to the central cloud store that you mention.

The part that is lacking is the metadata layer for pics/audio etc which allows apps to read others files, but that could be an easy layer on top of this API.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync

FWIW Groupon hired a lot of bigs from other companies prior to IPO, but it was more about ecommerce executives than software and design. There are a lot of great people that want to work at a hot proven company (not a small startup), and Dropbox probably fits that best.

Dropbox is certainly out of startup realm and the time from now to possible IPO is good time to hire best engineering talent in the valley.

I ask this to myself: what's the limit?. A company with millions on revenue still being called startup. Could somebody please help me understand why?

I would prefer to call Dropbox as mid-sized company with momentum

I'd say it's more to do with number of employees. 37signals would be considered a start-up by most people while Facebook is definitely not a start-up

I would not think of 37signals as a startup because they're not focused on growth, in search of a business model, in search of funding, or going through other startup-specific issues.

Facebook has mobile design? Maybe he did the decent bits, and feel free to correct me, but by the evidence of my Android facebook app I'd be glad to be shot of anyone in that department.

The Facebook app for the iPhone is actually pretty good, after the switch from HTML5 to native.

The design of the app isn't bad, but the implementation is worthless. I don't know if he's responsible, but the slide away panel has inspired a lot of imitation as a design pattern.

Ah, yes now that slide away panel is neat! That's decent and better implemented than the Android browser I first saw it on (racking my brains to remember which) but still it's just one innovation. Like putting the coolest new cupholding system in the execrable Dodge Neon. Call me curmudgeonly (I've just had a tooth implant so I have an excuse) but if you're actually in charge of interface and still you can't get overall UX even to be adequate in a major product, then you're not managing and communicating upwards well enough. Yes, I don't know the ins and outs of who owned the whole experience, but understanding the shoddiness of the roll out of their Android product in the past three years is very important!

So a great programmer, a great designer and all round nice kinda guy. I already hate him :/

Rasmus is also behind the original design of Spotify interaction design, branding and more. He is one of the most talented designers I know about, this is really good news for Dropbox!

He's a developer as well.

He was wasted at Facebook. Loved his work till he went there and was disappointed someone with so much potential ended up in that talent black hole of a company

As a designer, he should've been able to sell his designs more effectively to the management. While I loved his work at Spotify, I wonder if I did anything significant at Facebook.

Or maybe they should've trusted him more given he has a good track record. Quite frankly, I don't think it's an isolated incident given what I've heard from other stellar designers who have left Facebook.

Can you tell us more? The interaction product between great designers and an org that can provide the environment which affords their talent to thrive is something which would benefit from some decent narratives.

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