Buttonless - Reimagine drag & drop for sharing on web
Insight: Social sharing is an important part of web browsing, yet our experiences across multiple websites is fragmented. A universal solution has not yet been discovered. Different browsers lead to different user-flows and the user needs a much more coherent experience that allows them to embrace their requirement of multiple social platforms.
Challenge: There are two reasons for this fragmentation: when to display this share button and how to display the social media. For example, users are much more likely to share when they are reading an article, so the website shows dozens of social media buttons. This does not look elegant.
Idea: A question was raised during research: does a button need to exist in the first place? I explored the interaction users have with their mouse and noticed the way our hand moves when we click down on a mouse is the same action as grabbing a piece of paper. So, a user can "grab" a webpage and "throw" it to their favourite social media platform by bringing in a drag and drop experience on a desktop browser. No more buttons needed.
This led to the idea of content-aware sharing. There are only so many social media platforms a person would frequently use for the type of content they wanted to share, such as website URLs, images or quotes, so this mechanism helped to break the platforms into categories. By having the same social media icons appeared at the same position around the cursor when triggered also incorporated the use of help user remember with muscle memory, which speeds up the task even further after a period of a time.
Avalible at Google Chrome Store
