Dropbox Paper is a web-based, co-editing tool that includes word processing, document creation and coordination features.
The tool is free to use and allows multiple people to collaborate on a document.
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Zeplin
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Zeplin, from the company of the same name, is a platform supporting collaboration in application development by engineers and designers by providing an API with popular collaboration, development and prototyping tools and creating a space where productions can be shared and reviewed.
When collaborating with a team on content creation with the purpose of bringing multiple inputs in a nonstructured or nonfixed media type, this is a great choice because of its diversity of content and collaboration tools, however, if you are looking to have high flexibility in a particular content creation stream, for example, sophisticated text editing or presentation, there are a lot of strong competitors out there.
I still have some issues, especially with color integration between the style guide and also project. When we update the colors, it's not automatically sync to every project. Aside from that, zeplin solves my problem for hand-off design from design to developer. I set zeplin is source of truth design file
With Dropbox Paper, I can insert images and videos into your document, to make the document more visual, which is helpful for creating newsletters and simple flyers.
Once you create a document, you can save it as a template to be reused as a starting point for creating new documents.
Dropbox Paper has some basic formatting features like bolding text, adding links, and creating H1 and H2 headings.
You can insert tables into your Dropbox Paper document
Dropbox Paper also has an unusual but helpful feature, and that is the time line feature.
Ease in automatically building design style guides, saving time that might be spent on building style guides in another tool (such as InDesign).
Users can use Mac, PC, or web versions of this app to collaborate on a single project, enabling us to work with a wider pool of contractors.
Accelerates the design-to-development workflow, as it’s very easy to import Sketch or Photoshop files through plug-ins, and HTML/CSS codes are automatically created based on designs.
Provides cross-platform specifications for web, iOS, and Android, which can save developers time in figuring out specifications beyond the “main platform" on their own.
-Inconvenient table of contents; -Search only checks screens' names in the Zeplin project, not checks text on the screens, even though it's stored there as text and can be easily read from a technical perspective; -I have to log in too often. This is too secure for such an application
Zeplin has classic support with a chat from the website. It's working fine, and we're also getting the support needed when needed. However, Zeplin is very good at closing the incidents and moving on. It was a while ago we had a case with their support so that it might have improved since then.
I was not part of the decision making to acquire the Dropbox tool against any of the other options and competitors. However, I can assume that the fact that we have been using Dropbox File Management for many years and many important files are stored and shared in the tool everyday, the adding of Dropbox Paper should have been felt very natural.
Zeplin is great to inspect and share user interfaces, specifications and assets, perfect for developers. Tools like InVision and Marvel are much better to create prototypes for both developers, coworkers and even stakeholders, but they don't have this kind of feature (inspection) as Zeplin does. So each of them can be used for different purposes, offering different approaches to share and interact with layouts for apps and websites.
Dropbox Paper has allowed all of our employees to be much more productive and on track even when we can't be in the office, which from a management standpoint is a huge positive impact. They know that productivity isn't slowing or lacking when everyone isn't actually sitting in the office under their watchful eye.
It has had a huge impact on our turn around time and speed of getting more work and projects completed. The more work you can effectively get done in a time period means more money for the bottom line.
It has made the majority of our team members more accountable and reliable when they know everyone is working together on something and each person has their own checklist of items to complete. It is especially helpful that everyone can see the same checklist, so everyone knows what each other is accomplishing.
Development time has reduced as the design updates are communicated in real time to developers and they don't have to write the boilerplate code as it's already generated.
Employee engagement has improved as every stakeholder is aware about the design changes from the beginning and can give their inputs.
Designers save a lot of time as they don't to explicitly communicate when the update or publish their designs and also it just takes a couple of clicks to publish their designs. Also, lot of rework is saved as every stakeholder is involved right from the beginning.
