Designit

Each and every day, Designit explores the way people think, behave and interact with their environments. The strategic design firm uses this expertise to help ambitious brands create high-impact products, service and spaces that people love, because what matters to people matters to business.

Designit’s people-first approach is reflected in its culture. At Designit’s heart is an emphasis on employee experience, flexibility and collaboration. Back in 2015, that’s what paved the way for Dropbox to become the company’s collaboration standard. After finding that many employees were already using personal Dropbox accounts, Designit purchased a company account that now has nearly 1,000 users. “We try to embrace the tools that employees prefer to use,” says Global Executive Director Kjersti Lund. “We see that as a critical piece of ensuring employee wellbeing.”

But as technology evolves, so do employees. With employees spread across 16 offices, Designit eventually wanted a simple solution to allow disparate teams to work on the same content in real time.

They turned to Dropbox Paper, which soon became another must-have for collaboration at the firm. “Paper is everywhere at Designit,” says Global IT Lead Morten Thomsen. “And the funny thing is we never really introduced it to anyone. Everyone knows how to use it because it’s simple and it works exactly like it should."

Across Designit, over 550+ employees are actively using Dropbox Paper to work together on projects in real time and streamline workflows. This has significantly reduced time spent on administrative tasks like emailing content or briefing teams on projects. Here are two examples of how teams at Designit use Dropbox Paper.

The Design Research Team

The Design Research team depends on Paper most during the early phases of a project. In these steps, the focus is on learning as much as possible about the challenge the client is facing. "Coordinating research and processing the data we need to truly understand our clients’ challenges requires attention to detail,” Lead Design Researcher James Bailey explains. “Paper makes it easier to work with data and draw attention to the most important points.”

In particular, features like the fast rendering of Dropbox links to screenshots speed up the entire process for James’ team. “It saves so much time, just being able to screenshot, paste the link, and bam, it's right there in the doc. I love it.” Additionally, the design team uses the highlight tool to call out key interview quotes, which are then grouped by theme. Tables are used to compare responses across different interviewees, with emojis helping provide visual cues.

The Marketing Team

Designit’s Marketing team is tasked with spreading the word about the company and its perspective on design to as wide a global audience as possible. This makes the team responsible for everything from social media to customer case studies to content for its thought leadership blog on Medium. Paper serves as both a container for that content as it’s developed and a flexible home for project coordination. “Paper is all about sharing, so it makes our project updates more visible,” says Designit’s Director of Marketing, Nicole Okumu. “Each of our 16 offices manages its own content, so Paper makes everything transparent, which makes our remote offices more autonomous.”

The marketing team also uses Paper to manage weekly social media plans. Within each of these docs, key content elements such as publishing date, content copy, thematic intent and images are organized, along with daily to-dos and action items for each post. When it’s time for a post to go live, the team’s digital strategist copies the content from the doc and publishes the post. “Paper is the first thing that really stuck for our team as a replacement for coordinating over e-mail,” says Okumu. “It comes without the version control issues and makes it easy to create a consistent, templated approach where everything is in one place.”

Designit’s Marketing team is on pace to create over 100 marketing assets in Paper this year. By reducing the reliance on email and eliminating version control issues, Paper helps Designit teams stay in sync.

Making all this great work possible is Designit’s IT team, which manages its Dropbox Enterprise deployment. They cite reduced barriers to collaboration as the most important benefit of Dropbox. “Our team is constantly working across different countries, time zones and offices,” says Thomsen. “A lot of solutions can accommodate that now, but none make it as seamless as Dropbox and Dropbox Paper.”

To hear them tell it, that’s not much of a burden, even for an account with almost 1,000 users. "Our users find Dropbox really easy to use,” says Global IT Administrator, Anh Le. “We simply don’t have to provide much support.”