What could be alternative to text selection?

Question

Say you are using some conferencing application, and are in an active session. Another person is online on Skype and is asking for the meeting info so they can join the session too. Time is critical factor and you want to share your meeting info with him.

To share the meeting info you went to your outlook and found it is cluttered with all the meeting requests, and it is very hard to find which meeting info to send across. You realize there is a “Meeting Info” tab in the conferencing application interface, but when you tried to copy the info the interface is not allowing you to do so.

To fix this I am considering 3 solutions:

1. Allow user to select and copy the text in the “Meeting Info” tab
2. A copy button - which “on Click” copies the text for the user
3. Share button – which “on Click” allows the user to enter the email address and share the info

Which might be the better approach, and are there any other possible solutions?

Answer 1

First of all, please don't prevent users from copying things :)

Then with regard to your question: I like how dropbox solves this.

If you click "Share", this dialog opens:

It allows you to:

• Share it with your contacts through e-mail (your option #3)
• Click a button to copy the link, which is confirmed with this flash message (your option #2):

(I guess in your case the social sharing is less relevant)

Even though I personally prefer manually copying a link over clicking a button to magically copy it to my clipboard, users tend to have trouble copying and pasting unintuitive information from a text, like random passwords and links with tokens (like https://meeting.me/G45hUis).

Maybe something like this would be a nice compromise: