131–140 of 166 posts
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 ph…
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.
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.
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.…
http://www.designofsignage.com/application/symbol/railway/la...
https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=exit%20Pictog...
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.…
> i.e., sending some information somewhere 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".
Upload literally means send (to a machine). Download means receive. There is no confusion there!
When you "share" something on a blog, or on social media, you are in fact, uploading data to that server! When I had a blog (in the early 2000s) I didn't bother to implement a back-end, so to share an article, I had to upload it. These are implementation details that should be, and fortunately now usually are, transparent to the end user.
The concept of sharing is far too nebulous and some icons get caught up on the future state the of the data. The concept of lots of people (implying sharing with a group, which isn't relevant if you are only sharing it with a single person); or the idea of "sharing a conversation" which implies a two-way exchange (hence the icons featuring loops) but again, that's something that might come later.
However, clicking the icon does not equate with sharing in that sense. It performs one specific action: one part of the sequence that makes up a conversation. It is only the sending/posting/uploading part. Perhaps even "speaking" or "telling". All of these words are equally synonymous in terms of what will happen, right now, as a result of clicking (or tapping) that icon. And that is the only context that matters.
Apple gets this right by focusing on the context of the immediate action, which after all is what the icon is supposed to represent. In this case, that action is that the data will be sent somewhere. There is a further sub-menu of options for all the possible destinations, which can be more explicit about what each one will do (e.g., send to one person, send to group, make public).
Some of the other icons might make sense at the second stage, where there is a need to distinguish between these different kinds of sending. In that context, icons alone are not ideal because there are too many options, yet lack of screen space isn't the problem anymore. Explicit text is better in that case, which is what OSX and iOS both do.
The Windows (Ubuntu) icon for example (or any of the other "group of people" icons) would make a lot more sense if it were a toggle, where selected means "this is public" and not selected means "this is private" but that's not how it is used (and there are also better ways to represent that).
The word "share" also isn't typically associated with an action that can be undone, like toggling a visibility property, even though (from a technical rather than marketing perspective) that is the only sense in which "sharing" is ever different from plain old sending.
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.…
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…
Except that's not what sharing is at all. I can share a photograph with one person by just emailing it to them. We can even share a conversation that way. I can turn it into a group conversation by adding CC recipients. Or I can make it public by sending to a newsgroup instead of an email recipient.
No social involved in any of those forms of sharing (although you could argue that Usenet is a social network).
The public folder icon isn't inconsistent because the "share" icon represents an action (click this to share something), whereas the folder icon represents a state (the folder is public; there's nothing to click on).
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 thin…
Yet interaction with the photo app an an example shows just how confused Apple is within just one app. I have the words Share, Select, and even an icon, sometimes all at once, sometimes just two of them, and occasionally just one of them. Where is the rhyme or reason?
in the end, learn my preferences, that cannot be hard. If i do not use twitter then never offer it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the couple billion people who sadly don't know what a milkshake is.
I grew up drinking milkshakes, but I didn't know that sharing one is a thing in America! So, add another two billion people to that number (highly scientific estimate).
http://www.best-norman-rockwell-art.com/images/1921-Norman-R...
The whole soda fountain phenomenon was before our time, so I'm not sure that milkshakes were available at most soda fountains, but it's easy to imagine the tableau relocated to the ice cream shop. The "milkshake icon" seems more evocative than the "soda icon".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the couple billion people who sadly don't know what a milkshake is.
They'll get by, just like hundreds of million who don't know what a floppy disk is
