The problem that comes before this one is whether share is a well-understood action.
If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control.
If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat under my control. Others can comment on it.
If I "share" via something like Dropbox, then I make the document accessible to others. No copy is made. If I share via URL, then I give read access. If I make a shared folder, then I give both read and write access.
Now, we techies know these are different things. Our mental model of non-technical users' thinking might suggest that, to them, these are all the same kind of action.
But are they?
Does an average non-technical user think of folder sharing, Facebook posts, and e-mail messages as the same category of action? I'm not sure he does.
I agree with what you are saying. Read my comment below.
Expanding on that, and with the clear examples you gave, maybe the thing is that traditional or classic icons pictures the channel where the information was traveling and not the action itself.
A fax icon implies sending a document because everyone knows that a fax can only send documents. So the icon is representing the channel.
Same for the envelope icon with email (or even snail mail). It pictures the channel, not the action.
If you see a group of icons, one with the Facebook icon, one with Reddit's, one with Slashdot's, etc, you automatically know that it has to do with that particular channel, even if the action per se might not be clear enough, e.g. if I click the Facebook icon, what action am I taking? am I uploading/sending/sharing/pasting/chatting/emailing?
I don't care, I only care that the channel is the correct one. The service that administers that channel is the responsible one for doing what the user expects.
So maybe a fundamental flaw, like you say, is that different actions represent different channels but we are trying to put actions AND channels under a single umbrella, then there's no surprise that you can find lots of edge cases where the idea doesn't apply.
Perhaps its more logical to refer to all of these types of action as "broadcast" rather than "share" actions. You are "broadcasting" a picture to facebook, or a link to the file via twitter, or the actual file via email. By referring to these actions as broadcast rather than share actions, you convey to the user that they are relinquishing power over that data, once the genie is out, you are not stuffing him back in. A good icon would be a radio antenna broadcasting things. Just a thought.
Yep, they are. It's impossible to share digital data without making a copy that is not under your control. There are some difference in write permissions, but people also do understand those.
I think you are over thinking this a little. If you take "share" as a blanket term for "make this file accessible to others in some form" then it is clear why all of these actions should be grouped together, even if their details and implementation are quite different. That is why I think the ios icon is not so problematic, because "share" in this sense is a generalisation of uploading. You are not necessarily sending the data to a server in the traditional sense, but you are transmitting it to another party in some form.
I'd add the "share" by "copying an url into the clipboard" (that even requires the user to manually go to another app and paste the url to actually share) which is a really common practice to avoid supporting millions of share methods.
I think "send" vs. "share" is a good point. Email/SMS/DM/IM all have a recipient - they're messages that are sent.
A social network or blog does not. They're objects that are shared.
Using separate icons for "share" vs "send" would make sense to users.
I'm thinking some kind of "upload" metaphor vs "message" metaphor is right. Messaging metaphors are easy, but upload is a bit more tricky... Apple might have the right idea - but Apple's "out of box" icon is too vague, obviously because of Apple's need to keep icons elegantly simple. I'd go for a bit more complexity:
An arrow pointing at a globe. When you share something, you share with the internet. MS Office used globes to represent the Web - like a chain+globe for a hyperlink and whatnot. Use that - an arrow at the globe implies you're sending something to the Internet (and generally a public or semi-public place on the Web specifically).
On iOS, the icon has even more meanings than that. The system share menu has three distinct sections. The first is AirDrop, to share a copy with a nearby device. The second is exporting to external apps and social networks (this can happen in many ways, as you described). And the third is to perform actions on the file within the app.
(The second and third sections are what can now be extended by developers in iOS 8.)
This is particularly interesting article because they have the answer to the question on the bottom of the page: http://i.imgur.com/0NdMB4S.png
The share icons are Facebook, Twitter and Google+ logos. The share icon that nobody agrees to is actually just the icon that is going to reveal the interface of the actual share icons.
I think that users don't want to share, they want to post on facebook, tweet or do the thing that people on google+ do(sorry, never used it) because the context of the thing that you are going to share is often appropriate to one of these and the reflex of the user is something like "I should post this on facebook so that my friends see it" or like "I should tweet this so that my audience sees it".
You can't find the logo for the share icon because the action is fundamentally something else. I don't know, maybe the button that will open the interface for the sharing buttons should just represent the logos of the services available.
Apple gets this spot on by having an icon represent the action actually being performed, i.e., sending some information somewhere. That could be to yourself (a bookmark) to another person, a group of people, or the public at large. It doesn't really matter.
Many of the others are trying to represent the abstract concept of "sharing", which doesn't fit the use case at all. That's why those icons don't make any sense. Others are representing specific technical concepts like graphs that again, only make sense for certain specific uses and aren't especially intuitive.
In many ways, it makes sense to outsource this kind of design to someone that doesn't speak any English and run the brief through a translator. That way you're forced to explain the concept that the icon needs to represent, instead of having the icon represent the English word that happens to be (perhaps wrongly) attached to the concept.
Distilling the concept down to an arrow pointing outwards to represent sending something is the kind of minimalist, universally intuitive design that Apple are often brilliant at. Approaching the design task like an engineering task is likely to lead to this as the optimal solution. I find it endlessly interesting that good designers tend to do this intuitively, in spite of not thinking anything like Engineers, whereas Engineers tend to do the opposite if forced to do design.
To me the Apple icon is actually the worst. The Apple icon allows me to guess what the icon might symbolise, but I'm constantly guessing wrong and skip that icon, and it's completely unrememberable, to me at least. It simply looks to much like the download, so I often overlook it, because I think it is the download icon.
The Windows icon or the "graph" is in my opinion much better. Even if it might be stretching the "share" metaphor, at least I'm not skipping the icon because I think it's something else.
Right, the icon really represents "send" or "upload" which to me is correct. The article seems to find fault in the fact that their "share" icon is the opposite of their "download" icon. But to me, if you consider the icon to mean "send" or "upload", then it makes sense that it is the opposite of "download".
My favourite is the icon of multiple people. That, to me, obviously signifies social which is what sharing is. You don't need an arrow in this case, just put a group of stick figures in the icon and it makes perfect sense.
Android's approach used to be very acceptable - a directed graph - but then they got rid of the arrows for some reason.
In the context of OS X I never understood what the button was because I never have any need to share something from within my OS. In fact I removed the button from my toolbar. I'm not sure it's that obvious if you didn't have the icon text.
In fact it's inconsistent even within OS X. The Public folder icon is a person on a street sign.
It seems like "just pick something arbitrary and everyone agree on it" is a better solution than "find a small simple icon that effectively evokes 'share' to a brand new user." In other words, this is confusing not because the icons don't represent sharing well enough, but because they're different on every platform. There are lots of things on computers that aren't immediately obvious, but once you learn the convention, you don't forget it. I don't care which one we use, but we need to be consistent. (Ok, not the milkshake.)
There is no doubt in my mind, that the milkshake is the best possible icon for sharing. The only thing that could conceivably be better would be a Lady-and-the-Tramp-style single-strand spaghetti dinner, but that might be hard to draw.
There is some irony to the fact that we cannot 'share' what the 'share icon' is supposed to look like.
Unless some decree comes down from The President or the security council of the UN then we will probably have Apple/Microsoft/Android variants for a long time to come. There is no incentive for social networks to have a standard icon because they want sharing to be their icon/logo. Maybe it might be a better convention to perpetuate the share button as being uniquely un-shareable just for meme value.
Rather than "Share", read the action as "Send to".
This clarifies the author's preference for icons with the arrows, fits with the usual mix of upload/post-to-social-app/open-in-other-app actions, and removes the motivation for the somewhat out-of-place milkshake icon.
(You can keep the 'share' label for marketing purposes if you want...)
Upload and Share tend to be the same thing for most users. You want this on that. I don't think it's coincidence that the share icon looks like an upload icon in iOS7.
Completely agree. You can argue that sharing is uploading to another person. Obviously not downloading it.
This really isn't about sharing, its about sending the content outwards. The subsequent action will dictate whether its to share or pass to another program or even copying for a later paste.
Its sending the "thing" outwards...away from yourself. To something else.
I think the Android icons are fine. The old one is a bit easier to understand due to the explicit arrow direction, but the new one is implicitly directed correctly for people who are trained to read left to right. It's abstract and consequently vague, but I don't think that's a big problem: I expect there to be a share functionality, and in that context the icon is easy enough to understand.
The new Apple icon is less abstract, but it does seem to scream upload/send to server, which is also a function I might expect in similar situations as a share function; I think the old one is better because it points to the side signifying communication towards a peer.
The Windows 8 one is fine, easily understandable in context for the same reasons as the new Android one, but it lacks any semblance of directionality. It's a bit hilarious that it's almost identical to the Ubuntu icon.
The other two are terrible and I probably wouldn't expect them to signify sharing even in a context where I'd expect the functionality.
Edit: Of course I am an Android user so this may just be (confirmation?) bias at work. :)
> the new one is implicitly directed correctly for people who are trained to read left to right. It's abstract and consequently vague, but I don't think that's a big problem: I expect there to be a share functionality, and in that context the icon is easy enough to understand.
I disagree. I think you're just rationalizing your own knowledge of what this means. And I say that because, as someone who's never used Android, I have literally never seen that icon before. And if I had seen it in a context other than a blog post about share icons, I would have had no idea whatsoever what it meant.
> the old one is better because it points to the side signifying communication towards a peer
Except that every standard form of sharing involves uploading to a server – very few are actually handled in a peer-to-peer fashion (bluetooth sharing between adjacent devices is the exception, not the rule).
The odd part about the Android icons is that they imply "make public" or "send to multiple locations". Neither may be the case. Email to a single recipient is the likely common case. You might just be uploading to your personal network drive (no other users, just yourself).
I think the Android icon (and the Windows icon) does convey the concept of "social network" and if this icon was exclusively used for FB/Twitter/Whatever, that would be appropriate.
But "share" is often used for emailing, or just marking a file as "public" in its existing storage.
I've never used a "share" button if I could avoid it and so haven't thought about what the icon should look like. The concept probably doesn't have a good icon because the concept itself is one born out of laziness and ineptitude on the part of users.
If I want to share something on Twitter I'll use Twitter. If I want to share something on Google+ I'll use Google+. Why should I be expected to try interacting with those services through Javascript or any other third party application that needs to authenticate?
I just have a bookmark. Google+, bam. Twitter, bam.
My phone uploads all photos to Google+ whenever it finds Wifi and if I want to share a photo it's because I'm using Google+ at that moment. I don't need to share photos from anywhere, at most I generally need to export photos.
But the share button has become to ubiquitous that now it seems to have taken the place of export in iPhoto, as an example. I need to navigate menus to find the export option.
I don't need functionality spelled out for me while I'm using a computer like it was something designed by Fisher Price. If I want to send an email I'll start composing an email. If I want to share something on Google+ I'll go use that application.
iPhoto doesn't have an upload to Google+ option, in the case that I'm trying to manage photos from my digital camera. Which brings up another problem, which is that Facebook and Apple are in each other's pockets. Once these share buttons are ubiquitous then companies when they feel like it omit options.
Is there a meaningful difference between share and upload any more? "I have something on my device, I want to put it somewhere else" is how that icon is used in iOS and OSX, and for almost all of my use cases, that seems to be correct.
I think the milkshake is a step in the right direction. Many other popular icons (envelope for e-mail, key for authentication, gear for changing inner working aka settings) borrow from a non-digital analogy, and I think that's what the author was trying to represent with the milkshake. The milkshake unfortunately does not quite meet the analogy. When you share content, you are not sharing something that is limited physically (like a toy, food, or drink). Rather you are spreading the word about a piece of information. Two more accurate representation that I can think of would be one person whispering into another's ear (for DM), or a person on a podium like he/she is giving a speech (for broadcast).
What I like about the megaphone is that looks similar to what we are doing, shouting to whoever wants to hear.
When you think about sharing a milkshake, you have two people sharing an experience; when you think about the open hand, looks like you are expecting someone to show up to hand over something to him or maybe begging.
My feeling when I click share or retweet is like I am shooting to stars and the odds that my bullet get to a black hole are huge.
I think the modern icons are striving for a more abstract and minimalistic look. This seems to be the case for all 3 mobile OS covered. This is mostly about fashion, I guess, but an abstract icon does look less out of place in more situation. I can well imagine being slightly miffed about having to put a megaphone in my app to fit platform conventions, although I would gladly take it over that god-awful present icon WPOS7 apparently had.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but after reading the Milkshake concept, I thought that maybe the problem is in the word "share" as the driving concept and not the icon per se.
In terms of the milkshake, that's the perfect icon. You actually share something when you stop having "a whole" and now you have "a part" but then someone else has "a part" as well. That's what I've seen parent teach their kids over and over again. Sharing the ball: we both use it, share your candy we both enjoy it, even if it means I'll have less.
With electronic articles and other media that gets shared, you actually share nothing in that sense, you just let someone know about it, whilst still keeping the whole yourself.
I know that semantically you can also "share information", and you lose nothing by doing it. But my point is that maybe most people associate sharing with "losing a bit to give to someone else" instead of just "letting know".
I am thinking hard and haven't come up with a better word, I admit it, but maybe there is actually a better word for describing that "electronic share" action?
The bullhorn looks promising, but like someone said, it looks like an axe is too small. And also someone else said it would have to be different enough from a volume icon.
Maybe two hands apart, one with a piece of "the whole" and the other hand with the other piece?
In that regard I liked the Android icon a lot, even though it's a bit too abstract. But it conveys the idea that you just multiplied the information, without losing anything yourself. Maybe a diagram of an "information bus" could work? like a straight horizontal line with a perpendicular line protuding from it, indicating that you keep going but still produced a new path/road/source?
I'm perfectly ok with the Android icon, which looks different from just about everything else and is easy to remember once learned. The Apple icon looks too generic, and there are already way too many icons that look document-ish. The Windows icon looks too much like Ubuntu to me, and it additionally isn't intuitive that a circular icon means sharing. The Dropbox & Google Apps icons are great, but are also large and wouldn't necessarily be easy to distill down into a square, single color representation.
By far my biggest pet peeve re:action icons these days are the Android copy/paste icons. Here's a screenshot I found: http://i.stack.imgur.com/87bDm.png (pardon the annotations -- I found it in a Stackexchange thread).
I challenge anyone to tell me what each one does (without testing first).
I think this one is easy. We take the RSS icon and use it for sharing instead. Such a waste to have such a good icon only be used for such a specific data stream.
Just yesterday, while developing a Cordova hybrid app intended to target iOS, Android & Windows Phone 8, this very notion became unsettlingly apparent for me. BTW, http://icons8.com is a great place to do icon recon.
Personally, I like the iOS 6 icon over the iOS 7 version. They're almost the same, except the new one places too much emphasis on "up." For example, when using the Meme Producer app and you want to save the picture to your photo library, the app uses the iOS 7 "action" icon but it feels awkward to then immediately go to the "download" icon to actually save. http://i.imgur.com/YtVd5WZ.jpg
I'd think an arrow to the world would be the right icon, at least if you're doing a "publicize". I think grouping email in with other forms of broadcasting is part of the problem. I'd like to see two icons - one for "broadcast" which would be arrow-to-world (for FB/Twitter/Instagram/etc), and one for "send to a person" which would be an email-like letter icon, (for direct-messaging, emails, SMS, etc). While it may be similar to us developers, to a user the idea of "share" vs "send" is semantically different. "send" operations have recipients. "share" operations do not.
The author seems to contradict himself in the conclusion: while earlier he states that the Android share icon is also used by ShareThis, and that variations on it comprise the majority of search results for the term "share icon", he then concludes by saying that the Apple/iOS icon is "suitable to use in a general site/app", while the Android icon is "suitable to use in an Android app".
I think the author's own greater familiarity with one icon (by virtue of being an OSX/iOS user) has led him to make an overreaching conclusion about the wider population.
[+] [-] ggchappell|11 years ago|reply
If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control.
If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat under my control. Others can comment on it.
If I "share" via something like Dropbox, then I make the document accessible to others. No copy is made. If I share via URL, then I give read access. If I make a shared folder, then I give both read and write access.
Now, we techies know these are different things. Our mental model of non-technical users' thinking might suggest that, to them, these are all the same kind of action.
But are they?
Does an average non-technical user think of folder sharing, Facebook posts, and e-mail messages as the same category of action? I'm not sure he does.
[+] [-] joshuak|11 years ago|reply
The computer world is the one that limited these concepts.
Before web: you can only copy and give.
After web: you can give, or publish.
After cloud: you can give, publish, and share.
I think these concepts should be as well differentiated in the digital world as they are in the physical.
[+] [-] saganus|11 years ago|reply
Expanding on that, and with the clear examples you gave, maybe the thing is that traditional or classic icons pictures the channel where the information was traveling and not the action itself.
A fax icon implies sending a document because everyone knows that a fax can only send documents. So the icon is representing the channel.
Same for the envelope icon with email (or even snail mail). It pictures the channel, not the action.
If you see a group of icons, one with the Facebook icon, one with Reddit's, one with Slashdot's, etc, you automatically know that it has to do with that particular channel, even if the action per se might not be clear enough, e.g. if I click the Facebook icon, what action am I taking? am I uploading/sending/sharing/pasting/chatting/emailing?
I don't care, I only care that the channel is the correct one. The service that administers that channel is the responsible one for doing what the user expects.
So maybe a fundamental flaw, like you say, is that different actions represent different channels but we are trying to put actions AND channels under a single umbrella, then there's no surprise that you can find lots of edge cases where the idea doesn't apply.
[+] [-] x0054|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|11 years ago|reply
Yep, they are. It's impossible to share digital data without making a copy that is not under your control. There are some difference in write permissions, but people also do understand those.
[+] [-] unfamiliar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecesena|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|11 years ago|reply
A social network or blog does not. They're objects that are shared.
Using separate icons for "share" vs "send" would make sense to users.
I'm thinking some kind of "upload" metaphor vs "message" metaphor is right. Messaging metaphors are easy, but upload is a bit more tricky... Apple might have the right idea - but Apple's "out of box" icon is too vague, obviously because of Apple's need to keep icons elegantly simple. I'd go for a bit more complexity:
An arrow pointing at a globe. When you share something, you share with the internet. MS Office used globes to represent the Web - like a chain+globe for a hyperlink and whatnot. Use that - an arrow at the globe implies you're sending something to the Internet (and generally a public or semi-public place on the Web specifically).
[+] [-] cmelbye|11 years ago|reply
(The second and third sections are what can now be extended by developers in iOS 8.)
[+] [-] staz|11 years ago|reply
Including : * Printing the document * Viewing a video on my TV * Mailing it * Marking it to Read Later * Copying the URL * etc...
technically it's more a "Send to another application"
[+] [-] twelvechairs|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|11 years ago|reply
The share icons are Facebook, Twitter and Google+ logos. The share icon that nobody agrees to is actually just the icon that is going to reveal the interface of the actual share icons.
I think that users don't want to share, they want to post on facebook, tweet or do the thing that people on google+ do(sorry, never used it) because the context of the thing that you are going to share is often appropriate to one of these and the reflex of the user is something like "I should post this on facebook so that my friends see it" or like "I should tweet this so that my audience sees it".
You can't find the logo for the share icon because the action is fundamentally something else. I don't know, maybe the button that will open the interface for the sharing buttons should just represent the logos of the services available.
[+] [-] robert_tweed|11 years ago|reply
Many of the others are trying to represent the abstract concept of "sharing", which doesn't fit the use case at all. That's why those icons don't make any sense. Others are representing specific technical concepts like graphs that again, only make sense for certain specific uses and aren't especially intuitive.
In many ways, it makes sense to outsource this kind of design to someone that doesn't speak any English and run the brief through a translator. That way you're forced to explain the concept that the icon needs to represent, instead of having the icon represent the English word that happens to be (perhaps wrongly) attached to the concept.
Distilling the concept down to an arrow pointing outwards to represent sending something is the kind of minimalist, universally intuitive design that Apple are often brilliant at. Approaching the design task like an engineering task is likely to lead to this as the optimal solution. I find it endlessly interesting that good designers tend to do this intuitively, in spite of not thinking anything like Engineers, whereas Engineers tend to do the opposite if forced to do design.
[+] [-] mrweasel|11 years ago|reply
The Windows icon or the "graph" is in my opinion much better. Even if it might be stretching the "share" metaphor, at least I'm not skipping the icon because I think it's something else.
[+] [-] Holbein|11 years ago|reply
http://www.designofsignage.com/application/symbol/railway/la...
https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=exit%20Pictog...
[+] [-] matt-attack|11 years ago|reply
Right, the icon really represents "send" or "upload" which to me is correct. The article seems to find fault in the fact that their "share" icon is the opposite of their "download" icon. But to me, if you consider the icon to mean "send" or "upload", then it makes sense that it is the opposite of "download".
[+] [-] joshvm|11 years ago|reply
Android's approach used to be very acceptable - a directed graph - but then they got rid of the arrows for some reason.
In the context of OS X I never understood what the button was because I never have any need to share something from within my OS. In fact I removed the button from my toolbar. I'm not sure it's that obvious if you didn't have the icon text.
In fact it's inconsistent even within OS X. The Public folder icon is a person on a street sign.
[+] [-] personZ|11 years ago|reply
Yet most people find the Apple icon obtuse and confusing. I would hardly say that's spot on when it fails at its primary role.
[+] [-] zippergz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|11 years ago|reply
There is no doubt in my mind, that the milkshake is the best possible icon for sharing. The only thing that could conceivably be better would be a Lady-and-the-Tramp-style single-strand spaghetti dinner, but that might be hard to draw.
[+] [-] Theodores|11 years ago|reply
Unless some decree comes down from The President or the security council of the UN then we will probably have Apple/Microsoft/Android variants for a long time to come. There is no incentive for social networks to have a standard icon because they want sharing to be their icon/logo. Maybe it might be a better convention to perpetuate the share button as being uniquely un-shareable just for meme value.
[+] [-] kbutler|11 years ago|reply
This clarifies the author's preference for icons with the arrows, fits with the usual mix of upload/post-to-social-app/open-in-other-app actions, and removes the motivation for the somewhat out-of-place milkshake icon.
(You can keep the 'share' label for marketing purposes if you want...)
[+] [-] ripter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esamek|11 years ago|reply
This really isn't about sharing, its about sending the content outwards. The subsequent action will dictate whether its to share or pass to another program or even copying for a later paste.
Its sending the "thing" outwards...away from yourself. To something else.
[+] [-] lcnmrn|11 years ago|reply
The same thing happen with information, it goes from one place to another. The fact that this action takes many forms doesn't really matter.
[+] [-] morsch|11 years ago|reply
The new Apple icon is less abstract, but it does seem to scream upload/send to server, which is also a function I might expect in similar situations as a share function; I think the old one is better because it points to the side signifying communication towards a peer.
The Windows 8 one is fine, easily understandable in context for the same reasons as the new Android one, but it lacks any semblance of directionality. It's a bit hilarious that it's almost identical to the Ubuntu icon.
The other two are terrible and I probably wouldn't expect them to signify sharing even in a context where I'd expect the functionality.
Edit: Of course I am an Android user so this may just be (confirmation?) bias at work. :)
[+] [-] eridius|11 years ago|reply
I disagree. I think you're just rationalizing your own knowledge of what this means. And I say that because, as someone who's never used Android, I have literally never seen that icon before. And if I had seen it in a context other than a blog post about share icons, I would have had no idea whatsoever what it meant.
[+] [-] gilgoomesh|11 years ago|reply
Except that every standard form of sharing involves uploading to a server – very few are actually handled in a peer-to-peer fashion (bluetooth sharing between adjacent devices is the exception, not the rule).
The odd part about the Android icons is that they imply "make public" or "send to multiple locations". Neither may be the case. Email to a single recipient is the likely common case. You might just be uploading to your personal network drive (no other users, just yourself).
[+] [-] Pxtl|11 years ago|reply
But "share" is often used for emailing, or just marking a file as "public" in its existing storage.
[+] [-] Kequc|11 years ago|reply
If I want to share something on Twitter I'll use Twitter. If I want to share something on Google+ I'll use Google+. Why should I be expected to try interacting with those services through Javascript or any other third party application that needs to authenticate?
I just have a bookmark. Google+, bam. Twitter, bam.
My phone uploads all photos to Google+ whenever it finds Wifi and if I want to share a photo it's because I'm using Google+ at that moment. I don't need to share photos from anywhere, at most I generally need to export photos.
But the share button has become to ubiquitous that now it seems to have taken the place of export in iPhoto, as an example. I need to navigate menus to find the export option.
I don't need functionality spelled out for me while I'm using a computer like it was something designed by Fisher Price. If I want to send an email I'll start composing an email. If I want to share something on Google+ I'll go use that application.
iPhoto doesn't have an upload to Google+ option, in the case that I'm trying to manage photos from my digital camera. Which brings up another problem, which is that Facebook and Apple are in each other's pockets. Once these share buttons are ubiquitous then companies when they feel like it omit options.
[+] [-] epmatsw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radley|11 years ago|reply
The Android share icon has been around since (at least?) 2006 and was used a lot on websites, particularly Wordpress-based sites.
It was initially open source but then sold Share This and trademarked. Most services use the icon shape without ST's green button background.
[+] [-] thrush|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mopedDreams|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lclemente|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probablyfiction|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antidaily|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nakovet|11 years ago|reply
When you think about sharing a milkshake, you have two people sharing an experience; when you think about the open hand, looks like you are expecting someone to show up to hand over something to him or maybe begging.
My feeling when I click share or retweet is like I am shooting to stars and the odds that my bullet get to a black hole are huge.
[+] [-] morsch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lominming|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrey-p|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melloclello|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saganus|11 years ago|reply
In terms of the milkshake, that's the perfect icon. You actually share something when you stop having "a whole" and now you have "a part" but then someone else has "a part" as well. That's what I've seen parent teach their kids over and over again. Sharing the ball: we both use it, share your candy we both enjoy it, even if it means I'll have less.
With electronic articles and other media that gets shared, you actually share nothing in that sense, you just let someone know about it, whilst still keeping the whole yourself.
I know that semantically you can also "share information", and you lose nothing by doing it. But my point is that maybe most people associate sharing with "losing a bit to give to someone else" instead of just "letting know".
I am thinking hard and haven't come up with a better word, I admit it, but maybe there is actually a better word for describing that "electronic share" action?
The bullhorn looks promising, but like someone said, it looks like an axe is too small. And also someone else said it would have to be different enough from a volume icon.
Maybe two hands apart, one with a piece of "the whole" and the other hand with the other piece?
In that regard I liked the Android icon a lot, even though it's a bit too abstract. But it conveys the idea that you just multiplied the information, without losing anything yourself. Maybe a diagram of an "information bus" could work? like a straight horizontal line with a perpendicular line protuding from it, indicating that you keep going but still produced a new path/road/source?
Edit: added clarification
[+] [-] eitally|11 years ago|reply
By far my biggest pet peeve re:action icons these days are the Android copy/paste icons. Here's a screenshot I found: http://i.stack.imgur.com/87bDm.png (pardon the annotations -- I found it in a Stackexchange thread).
I challenge anyone to tell me what each one does (without testing first).
[+] [-] nob|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterc|11 years ago|reply
Personally, I like the iOS 6 icon over the iOS 7 version. They're almost the same, except the new one places too much emphasis on "up." For example, when using the Meme Producer app and you want to save the picture to your photo library, the app uses the iOS 7 "action" icon but it feels awkward to then immediately go to the "download" icon to actually save. http://i.imgur.com/YtVd5WZ.jpg
[+] [-] Pxtl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianpike|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rssaddict|11 years ago|reply
I think the author's own greater familiarity with one icon (by virtue of being an OSX/iOS user) has led him to make an overreaching conclusion about the wider population.