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Is it a good UX practice to use a Send by email button, like the Email icon here http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php, on a website to send content? The button would pop up a window where you can enter:

  • "From" email
  • "To" email
  • Subject
  • Some message

Then send the page content to a recipient straight from the website without the need of using an email client.

Specifically, I'm talking about a website which offers sport stays (weekend sports clinic, Zumba retreat, etc) so you could send another person the information on a package you're viewing.

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  • Your title says "required or redundant". This implies (?) that there's another way to do what you want to do with the email button. You attempt to provide context with "Specifically, I'm talking about a website which offers sport stays." but what does that mean?
    – elemjay19
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 22:37
  • You have a point. I consider whether I should use Email button or just let users to use email clients and copy paste url when they want to share "the stay info" with someone. Also want to know if there aren't any cases where email button is good to use or is not good to use. Is it more clear?
    – simPod
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 22:47
  • Part of the confusion is I don't know what a "sport stay" is. Can you explain that?
    – elemjay19
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 22:49
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    "sports stay" - people go there for a weekend and do zumba, fitness and all these stuff
    – simPod
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 23:04
  • I would be cautious about implementing an "email anyone you want" form, as it can be abused for spamming purposes.
    – cimmanon
    Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 18:46

1 Answer 1

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Your idea of sending the email via your site is in my opinion not a bad thing.

What I am not so sure of is the pop-up solution. During some previous research I noticed that users aren't always responding well to popups, for certain reasons:

  • They relate it with advertising or spam.
  • A popup usually means that the rest of the website is 'on the background' and not usable. This makes the user feel 'forced' to make a decision wether they send an email now, or never.

What I prefer to do, is creating the mail form inside the page - it still can be hidden before clicking on the email icon-, and not in a popup.

This makes the form more relatable to the website, and gives the user enough freedom to look around the page before actually sending the email.

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  • There's probably no need to be it popup window. However I don't want to have redundant elements in that page so I doubt whether users would use it or not. Doesn't people prefer to copy paste links into emails?
    – simPod
    Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 11:49
  • @simPod It wouldn't be too bad to have a single empty element and fill it via AJAX if a user wants to use it.
    – Andrew Leach
    Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 16:13
  • @simPod It could be a popup in spirit (i.e. open and close on demand), without covering anything or making anything unusable -- just have a section of the page expand when they click the button and hide once they send or cancel.
    – nmclean
    Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 17:13

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