Jun 9, 2021
Reflection Point: Google Drive
There are few tools in a student’s pocket that they continue to use even after graduation. For me, that tool is Google Drive. It helped me while I was in middle school all the way through college, allowing me to turn in assignments and get things done, a tool I still use to this very day. But why did Google Drive last all these years for me? It comes down to usability, accessibility, and ethics.
The organization of the folders and the allowance for the user to create as many pages and folders as necessary to stay organized is every student’s dream assistant. This is only one page of my entire drive, which houses everything from receipts to shopping lists, and I’m easily able to find anything that I am looking for.
Google Drive has a huge amount of space that is free for any user who has a Gmail account and it is very easy to know what to click on depending on where you would like to go. The use of both text and icons to help the user navigate through the options is a wonderful feature that can help any user of any age. The simple layout that utilizes the use of whitespace and the limited color palette makes it simple for anyone to find where they would like to go.
There are also breadcrumbs and other layouts available to make the experience of using Google Drive even easier for the user. The ethics portion comes from the fact that it is free to use and anyone who has a Gmail account can create a Google Drive account.
To add onto my way of thinking about this, I was, what many would call, a broke college student. Before that, a broke high school student, with limited funds for things like Microsoft Word and the like. Just because a student cannot afford to purchase things like this, it doesn’t mean the work was not expected to be done. This is really where Google Drive helped me out a lot.
I hope this has been informational and helped articulate why I chose to do a reflection point of Google Drive.
