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I've been looking for a common Material Design pattern for sharing an individual item from a list of content:

Material design list of content

I can't seem to find any strong recommendation from the guidelines other than not to use a long-press context menu (which I've come across in a number of other apps). Some options I seem to have are:

  • Show a three dot context menu on every item
  • Swipe an item left/right to trigger a share action
  • Go against the guidelines and use a long-press context menu

Is there a best practice / common pattern for this?

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  • Other than drill-down and share, what else can you do from this view? Once you drill-down into each article, how would use share? Do you think users would actually share from this view, given this is a partial view?
    – Jung Lee
    Commented Jan 30, 2016 at 19:01
  • I believe so. A lot of the content for my use case is long form and sharing multiple items to something like Pocket (to read later) is something I know users do. Commented Jan 30, 2016 at 19:06
  • If you expect users to share multiple items, then long-press is the only way to go. So if you hold-down on any one of the items, you'll see a checkbox appear for each item, with the item you held down pre-checked. And at the top of the screen appears a sticky menu bar with "Share" / "Delete" / "archive" or other relevant actions. At least that's your best be for coding native application.
    – Jung Lee
    Commented Jan 30, 2016 at 20:04

3 Answers 3

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Two reasonable options come to mind.

1. Long press > select > reveal a toolbar with share (etc)

2. Swipe > reveal share button

Option #1 does present a problem when the user selects multiple: How do you share that? Or do you take share away after revealing it for the single selection?

Option #2 doesn't present any particular concerns for me, though it does still require some learning on the user's part.

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Wouldn't users share from a detail view?

If list sharing is important, do make sure you won't repeat the same sharing icon on every line.

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Cards Design

I think in your case it is acceptable to use cards,a s above. Cards are only frowned upon on lists if there isn't many actions on the list and they are homogenous. You can customize your cards to fill the whole horizontal space, to look like the lists you have now.

Do. Grid tiles are a clean and lightweight way to present a gallery of images. Don't. Cards are unnecessary in a gallery of images (homogeneous content). from: Google Material Design Guidelines: Cards

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  • This is specifically the context in which cards are not recommended. Try it and I think you'll see why. Commented Mar 31, 2016 at 16:29

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