Sharing to social medias is a fundamental feature for Mobile apps. With Umeng Social Share Tool, developers can easily add the function into their app. Combined with the Umeng Analytics, they can view the data about their users sharing action.
This product started at 2011, I was the product and visual designer for this product.
Although iOS and Android provided a native sharing component, but there were three problems in their solution for China users.
1. They did not integrated the main social medias in China, like Weibo, Wechat, Renren and etc.
2. The sharing APIs from the social medias in China were not very developer friendly at that time. They spent lots of time to communicate with these medias and did not get a alter while these media had updated their APIs.
3.For android sharing component, the UI is following the third party operation system. It is necessary to aline the Sharing UI with the App UI.
Requirement
After user interview, we found that there are two types of users.
1. Easy integrate method
As simple as possible to add the social share function in their App.
2. Fully customised integrate mothod.
They had more develop skills than the previous users. They want to make a good-looks App and customised interaction.
A complete sharing process includes:
Click share button, Select which social media shares to, view/ edit sharing content, send.
All of above three steps are not necessary. For instance, if there is only one social media to share, the second step can be ignored. So to add the sharing function in a App will add some UI page into the App.
The sharing content always contains some text and a link, even a image, if the social media supports image.
We made a balance i among the user requirement, content format in each social media and the UI issue.
分享动作会对那些页面造成视觉影响
Easy integrate method
We provided a entire sharing UI pages for the sort of developer, they can copy this file into their app and it is done.
There are some small optional settings:
1. Choose a visual design between white type or black type;
2. Set which social medias can to share in the second step;
3. Set the link address.
They can not modify anything in the third step, view/ edit sharing content.
User Case
A life styling App used our product.
生活类应用“过日子”集成效果
Customised integration
For this type developers, we did not provide any default UI, only gave them the APIs. Our engineers built flexible APIs for all of features of each social media sharing function, like '#', location and audio for Weibo. Developer can choose whatever they wanted.
Sharing action is a lovely action. It is a good idea to encourage developers who have enough skills and cost to make sharing interaction more beautiful. We made some samples for them to use, or they can build a new one.
Website design
I design the website for the social share tool.
