🙌 Give Your Google Drive & AODocs Folders Some (Unicode) Character!

This trick provides a way to improve visual navigation and helps users to distinguish between their Drive folders and AODocs shared folders.

Navigating through my 200 folders on Google Drive was challenging enough before moving our organization to shared folders in Google drive using AODocs.  While I appreciated being able to use colors and stars for navigation, I suspected that the killer AODocs feature (the seamless melding of my Drive and shared AODocs folders) might be confusing to some of our users.  How would they know which folders were shared?

Tricks like naming folders with numbers would bring them to the top when sorted by name (the default), but staff were used to doing this already, so that wouldn't work. I needed a new way for folders to standout before I rolled out Google Drive. Then, I thought “Dingbats!”  And really what I meant was Unicode (but I just like saying Dingbats). 🙋

So I searched for a unicode search tool (a handy chrome extension that makes this easy-or you can go to emojipedia.org) and went to town in the admin interface of AODocs.  To my utter surprise and delight, using unicode characters and creative spacing in my AODocs folders ended up creating pure navigation joy: the folders with characters not only stood out from the rest, they stayed at the top!

This small but significant tweak made the Drive rollout much easier: the shared folders were obvious.  Now, today individual drives are still a work in progress, but I don’t get any calls about where the department drives are!  This also works for any Drive folder and for any folder that supports Unicode (Drive, Windows, etc).