Victoria Lagutski
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

I think that’s a great intention!

However, I agree with you, I feel like the majority of news websites would not want that implemented, cuz they care about views (more views — higher ad price).

But even if some agreed to use this type of functionality let’s think about the user (reader). Designing blogs/articles we need to keep in mind that a regular user reads about 2–3 news articles at a time. After finishing one, we need to keep them engaged to read another one by showing content that might be interesting based on the article they just read. We have to make the process of sharing as easy as possible to keep users engaged and still interested to continue reading, but this solution requires 3 additional steps to take and, what's more important, thinking! I imagine nobody would care to share the post by clicking “share” anymore but just copying the url (because we, users, are lazy, we choose what’s easier).

Another thing: each author/ editor would need to come up answers to this questionnaire popup. And what if there are few topics in this article and somebody focused on just one that was not listed?

I think it’s a great topic for discussion and brainstorming. To me, since news websites already calculate the time-to-read of the article (in minutes) by the number of symbols, what can be done is to just display the share button after the user spent some time reading the article. After the button appeared, the process of sharing would be as easy as it was before.

This way we would stop the users who just jumped straight to the bottom from sharing the article and keep our readers happy.

    Victoria Lagutski

    Written by

    Product Designer