The Next Level of User Experience of Cloud Storage Services: Supporting Collaboration with Social Features

Abstract

Nowadays, individuals' personal data is at their disposal real-time from any device through cloud storage services (CSS). Such services enable new kinds of collaboration between individuals and have fundamental impact on how we organize and share our data. Nevertheless, only a few studies have been made on the user experience (UX) of such services. This paper reports the user experience of different CSSs (focusing on Drop box, Google Drive, One Drive, and iCloud) based on 19 interviews and 65 survey responses. The results include reasons for the most positive and negative experiences and descriptions of current habits and motivations of the CSS users. As the current use of CSSs is still mostly individual we investigate the potential of taking the UX of CSSs to the next level by integrating different social features to current CSSs. We conclude the paper by explaining the importance of different Cloud UX aspects in CSS context and suggesting design implications improving UX for CSSs.