Apple gets this spot on by having an icon represent the action actually being performed, i.e., sending some information somewhere. That could be to yourself (a bookmark) to another person, a group of people, or the public at large. It doesn't really matter.
Many of the others are trying to represent the abstract concept of "sharing", which doesn't fit the use case at all. That's why those icons don't make any sense. Others are representing specific technical concepts like graphs that again, only make sense for certain specific uses and aren't especially intuitive.
In many ways, it makes sense to outsource this kind of design to someone that doesn't speak any English and run the brief through a translator. That way you're forced to explain the concept that the icon needs to represent, instead of having the icon represent the English word that happens to be (perhaps wrongly) attached to the concept.
Distilling the concept down to an arrow pointing outwards to represent sending something is the kind of minimalist, universally intuitive design that Apple are often brilliant at. Approaching the design task like an engineering task is likely to lead to this as the optimal solution. I find it endlessly interesting that good designers tend to do this intuitively, in spite of not thinking anything like Engineers, whereas Engineers tend to do the opposite if forced to do design.
To me the Apple icon is actually the worst. The Apple icon allows me to guess what the icon might symbolise, but I'm constantly guessing wrong and skip that icon, and it's completely unrememberable, to me at least. It simply looks to much like the download, so I often overlook it, because I think it is the download icon.
The Windows icon or the "graph" is in my opinion much better. Even if it might be stretching the "share" metaphor, at least I'm not skipping the icon because I think it's something else.
I agree that the most minimal version of the Apple icon isn't perfect. I prefer the less minimal OSX version.
The complaint that it is too similar to the download icon is valid, not because there's anything wrong with either icon; just because they are visually confusing where they might appear together. Rahter like waht I did to this senetnce.
I think that problem could be solved with better visual differentiation, through more clearly different arrow shapes, sizes, or inverting the colours (essentially, make more use of the arrowhead filling the box, or not). Again, they are very clearly differentiated on OSX, which is why I prefer those. I appreciate the minimalist version for the way it conveys the concept as simply as possible, I just don't think it's quite the "finished form" of this icon, it needs some further polish.
The complaint that it looks like a log out icon is also valid (while most logout icons I've seen have the arrow pointing right, it's yet more visual confusion). The mitigation against that is that Apple never has the icon anywhere that it might be mistaken for exit or log out. As a universal icon, that might not apply everywhere.
Right, the icon really represents "send" or "upload" which to me is correct. The article seems to find fault in the fact that their "share" icon is the opposite of their "download" icon. But to me, if you consider the icon to mean "send" or "upload", then it makes sense that it is the opposite of "download".
Exactly. Only an engineer would care about that distinction and I agree the article is at fault for calling it out as it does.
Upload literally means send (to a machine). Download means receive. There is no confusion there!
When you "share" something on a blog, or on social media, you are in fact, uploading data to that server! When I had a blog (in the early 2000s) I didn't bother to implement a back-end, so to share an article, I had to upload it. These are implementation details that should be, and fortunately now usually are, transparent to the end user.
The concept of sharing is far too nebulous and some icons get caught up on the future state the of the data. The concept of lots of people (implying sharing with a group, which isn't relevant if you are only sharing it with a single person); or the idea of "sharing a conversation" which implies a two-way exchange (hence the icons featuring loops) but again, that's something that might come later.
However, clicking the icon does not equate with sharing in that sense. It performs one specific action: one part of the sequence that makes up a conversation. It is only the sending/posting/uploading part. Perhaps even "speaking" or "telling". All of these words are equally synonymous in terms of what will happen, right now, as a result of clicking (or tapping) that icon. And that is the only context that matters.
Apple gets this right by focusing on the context of the immediate action, which after all is what the icon is supposed to represent. In this case, that action is that the data will be sent somewhere. There is a further sub-menu of options for all the possible destinations, which can be more explicit about what each one will do (e.g., send to one person, send to group, make public).
Some of the other icons might make sense at the second stage, where there is a need to distinguish between these different kinds of sending. In that context, icons alone are not ideal because there are too many options, yet lack of screen space isn't the problem anymore. Explicit text is better in that case, which is what OSX and iOS both do.
The Windows (Ubuntu) icon for example (or any of the other "group of people" icons) would make a lot more sense if it were a toggle, where selected means "this is public" and not selected means "this is private" but that's not how it is used (and there are also better ways to represent that).
The word "share" also isn't typically associated with an action that can be undone, like toggling a visibility property, even though (from a technical rather than marketing perspective) that is the only sense in which "sharing" is ever different from plain old sending.
My favourite is the icon of multiple people. That, to me, obviously signifies social which is what sharing is. You don't need an arrow in this case, just put a group of stick figures in the icon and it makes perfect sense.
Android's approach used to be very acceptable - a directed graph - but then they got rid of the arrows for some reason.
In the context of OS X I never understood what the button was because I never have any need to share something from within my OS. In fact I removed the button from my toolbar. I'm not sure it's that obvious if you didn't have the icon text.
In fact it's inconsistent even within OS X. The Public folder icon is a person on a street sign.
> That, to me, obviously signifies social which is what sharing is.
Except that's not what sharing is at all. I can share a photograph with one person by just emailing it to them. We can even share a conversation that way. I can turn it into a group conversation by adding CC recipients. Or I can make it public by sending to a newsgroup instead of an email recipient.
No social involved in any of those forms of sharing (although you could argue that Usenet is a social network).
The public folder icon isn't inconsistent because the "share" icon represents an action (click this to share something), whereas the folder icon represents a state (the folder is public; there's nothing to click on).
Many of the others are trying to represent the abstract concept of "sharing", which doesn't fit the use case at all. That's why those icons don't make any sense. Others are representing specific technical concepts like graphs that again, only make sense for certain specific uses and aren't especially intuitive.
In many ways, it makes sense to outsource this kind of design to someone that doesn't speak any English and run the brief through a translator. That way you're forced to explain the concept that the icon needs to represent, instead of having the icon represent the English word that happens to be (perhaps wrongly) attached to the concept.
Distilling the concept down to an arrow pointing outwards to represent sending something is the kind of minimalist, universally intuitive design that Apple are often brilliant at. Approaching the design task like an engineering task is likely to lead to this as the optimal solution. I find it endlessly interesting that good designers tend to do this intuitively, in spite of not thinking anything like Engineers, whereas Engineers tend to do the opposite if forced to do design.