"Often I think really great design disappears. You don't think about it," he says. "It's that 'of course' kind of feeling that I think is in so many of the great products that we've come to know and love over time."
When he's not running a vintage automobile enthusiast website with his friends, Underwood is shuffling between meetings at the online storage startup Dropbox. There he is responsible for coordinating the visual language and product design for a company that has tripled in size and nearly quadrupled its funding war chest in the last few years.
Related Story: With Mailbox, Dropbox moves beyond its cloud-storage beginnings
Underwood joined Dropbox as head of design in March of last year after the company paid a reported $100 million to scoop up him and his team of 12 alongside the simple, iPhone-only email app they had developed and launched a month prior. Mailbox amassed more than 1.5 million people in a waiting list post-launch, partly on neat design like swiping and snoozing features for organizing messages, but also by enabling users to think about their inbox as something that can, and should, approach zero all the time.
Since then, Underwood has helped that app, Mailbox, move from its iPhone beginnings onto the iPad, then onto Android devices, and now, onto the desktop as well. He's also helped Dropbox tackle the mountain of photos users dump into their cloud lockers, not by designing a solution to live within Dropbox, but by approaching it sideways with a dedicated app called Carousel. Carousel automatically uploads and organizes every photo you take with your smartphone and anything dropped in your Dropbox folder.
More importantly, Underwood has worked with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi on realizing their dream of a company that's more than just file hosting -- especially as that service has become a cramped space where storage pricing continues to fall to zero. The goal is what Underwood calls a constellation of solutions -- with Mailbox and Carousel as the base -- that solve everyday Web users' painful problems, and in the process attempt to drive more and more users back to Dropbox as the hub for your digital belongings.
"I think it's something that Drew really, before we even began talking, had set a vision of evolving from the magic folder into this ecosystem, into a set of products or experiences that were dedicated to solving these core use cases," Underwood says. "We joined under the flag of that vision, under the idea that Dropbox itself was going to be evolving into really a service prover that had much more product surface area than it had historically."
Underwood, a former IDEO designer who co-founded Orchestra in 2011 with former Apple employee Scott Cannon, is now tasked with helping Dropbox out-design its competitors, which include everyone from Apple and Google to Microsoft and Box. CNET sat down with Underwood prior to the Mailbox for desktop's public beta launch on Tuesday to discuss the evolution of Dropbox and the cardinal rules of good app design.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: It seems as if Dropbox has become more design-focused since acquiring Mailbox, and that the app now informs the ways in which Dropbox tackles problems. How do you see the evolution of the company since last March?
Underwood: I might challenge the narrative a little bit. Design has always been a big part of Dropbox. What's changed is the surface area of what needs to be designed.
Arash
