UI design pattern tips: auto-sharing

Although many people are designing mobile products that are social in nature, few understand what that really means, how it works, or why it's important.

In this series for Creative Bloq, Chris Bank of UXPin, the UX design app, discusses the importance of social design patterns and details examples from some of the hottest websites and web apps today.

You can see previous posts from UXPin here. Meanwhile, for more examples of web design patterns, download UXPin's free e-book, Web UI Design Patterns 2014 and their free Web UI kit.

The problem

The user wants to easily share their activity with their social networks.

The solution

Build and option that lets users automatically share particular interactions with their social networks.

A lot of web apps like Tumblr, Spotify and Vimeo are building granular sharing settings which allow users to automatically post updates to their networks based on their activity.

These updates can be posted within the app or even shared with external social channels like Facebook or Twitter.

Not only does this help the user engage with their friends and family in everyday activities like listening to a song or reading an article on an external website, it's also a great way to build awareness and engagement with the app itself.

For interactions like uploading a photo to Carousel or a video to Vimeo, this pattern makes it even easier for users by eliminating an extra step in the process which they are most likely going to take regardless.

Words: Chris Bank

Chris Bank is the growth lead at UXPin, a UX design app that creates responsive interactive wireframes and prototypes.