Jennifer Brook

Dropbox’s design researcher talks strategy, storytelling, saying goodbye to the freelance life – and squaring off with Steve Jobs.

- Julia Sagar

It’s hard to know where to start when talking to Jennifer Brook. There’s the time she went to California to work on the first New York Times iPad prototype, and ended up presenting it on stage with Steve Jobs at Apple’s 2010 iPad keynote announcement. Or the time she reportedly lived in a tree house for several years; or when she motorbiked around Southeast Asia during a gap in client work.

When we catch up with her towards the end of 2016, she’s just undertaken a huge move and joined file hosting service Dropbox’s research team full-time as lead design researcher – relocating from New York to San Francisco, and putting her successful independent consultant business on hold. The new job signifies the end of what Brook calls a “multi-year transition” from interaction designer to design researcher, and was driven by her passion for research. It’s an interesting move for someone who spent their initial career working in letterpress and book-making, and more recently collaborating with forward-thinking organisations on a freelance basis. How did Dropbox manage to lure her in-house?

“Last spring, I was working with the Dropbox design team in NYC on some research for new product features, ” she explains. “During field visits, I fell in love with the people who use Dropbox. It was eye-opening to see the diverse problems people are using Dropbox to solve. We talked to theatrical set designers who use it to coordinate complex workflows and collaborate with the dozens of people involved in making major Broadway productions. I interviewed someone working for the UN on peace building and crisis management, who uses Dropbox to collaborate with field offices around the globe.