Should I put an alert view notifying the user of a successful wall post with the Facebook SDK in iPhone?

Question

I am currently developing an iPhone app that connects to Facebook trough its SDK. One of the main functionalities is the option to share a post with a news story from the feed.

So basically I show the default Facebook screen so that user has three choices:

• Share
• Cancel
• Close the screen

The question is: should I put an alert view or something similar from my app after the user chooses one of these three?

Something like poping up a message saying successful post or is this unnecessary?

Answer 1

As a rule of thumb I personally give feedback to the user whenever something changes (or should change) state. So if you share/add a new post is a good idea to give them positive/negative feedback on the action taken. However that would be unnecessary if the user wants to cancel the action OR close the view (the closing view should be self-referential in terms of state change).

Answer 2

Although it is recommended to give users an indication that a task had completed successfully, iOS Alerts (pop ups) aren't the best way to do it per the iOS HIG:

In general, alerts are unnecessary if they [...] update users on tasks that are progressing normally

A better solution suggested in the iOS HIG is the Activity indicator, which tells users to wait until the action has completed.