Group Sharing. What You Told Us.

Giving feedback is a creative act. Special thanks for the 7,000+ people who responded to the “group sharing” survey. Here is an overview of what you told us.

Motivation

Here are some of the murmurs which capture the motivation behind this feature:

“Collecting and sharing design inspiration with rest of a team.”

“Commented news sharing between me and my brother. Read an article I like, “share it”, comment it, and then get notifications when he reads it and/or comments about it.”

“Mostly sharing interesting articles with specific people. Email gets old and would like to see what others are interested in as well. More of a two way sharing.”

“I have a small circle of colleagues and friend with likeminded interests. Whenever we come across an interesting article, we want to share it with the circle and get their thoughts on it. Email has too much friction.”

“I provide news alerts & research to a group of corporate recruiters. Topics of interest shared, change often, and may be of short duration.”

“Sharing and commenting with a few friends of similar interest”

“Share articles with my wife.”

“Fast and easy sharing to small group of people sharing interest (e.g, food, technology) and discussion about the items.”

“Co-workers in various disciplines, one group per discipline (project managers, CAD operators, managers, IT department, installers, etc.). Customers in various vertical markets.”

“I find interesting health related articles and forward them via email to people I know would find it relevant to their health efforts.”

Patterns

Despite the very large number of responses, there is a very consistent set of requirements:

Be able to target smaller groups of people (wife, family, team, subset of friends with similar interest) and not pollute their twitter, facebook or LinkedIn timelines.

Remove friction from the type of sharing which is currently implemented using email.

90% of users think that they will be happy with 1-5 groups.

78% of users want support for threaded conversations (ie this is more about triggering interesting private conversations than simply sharing information).

The term “interest” was used more than 1000 times in the use case description field.

People requesting this feature are savvy sharers who use already heavily twitter, facebook, google+ and email – almost evenly.

Focus on simplicity and minimize the number of clicks needed to share an article with a group or comment on an existing conversation.

Next?

We have a few ideas. We are going to turn them into a beta and reach back to you for some testing. More on that in a couple of weeks.