Uploading Media
Images, videos & links
The bread and butter of each composer (editor) are adding images, videos, articles or other media. Every social media platform has different media requirements. One platform would allow PNG and JPEG but another would only allow JPEG under a certain file size and resolution. One platform would accept GIFs but another would only accept MP4. The main goal was to have the backend take care of this instead of the user. What happens under the hood is very impressive and made designing this composer a rewarding experience.
Picking a time
Set it and forget it
Setting a date and time when to publish a post is probably the most crucial part of our solution. We chose for a UX pattern that is familiar to our audience. They know it from using Gmail and Microsoft: the split button dropdown. In the dropdown the user finds some quick suggestions and an option to fully customize the date and time.
During our competitor analysis and interviews we noticed that it was important to make it super clear what the button does. People would complain about accidentally posting something instantly, without a way back. Our solution is not a 100 percent solid. Sometimes users have a hard time changing the date from within the composer. We solved this partly by changing how things work on the calendar.
Mentioning & Tagging
Not the preferred solution
Customers expect us to have the same features they have natively. Mentioning people and businesses in captions was definitely on top of that list. The limits set by external APIs and the way we coded our editor made this a complex problem. Here are some of the constraints:
Facebook and Linkedin don’t allow to search and mention personal profiles.
LinkedIn requires you to enter the slug or URL to find the mention.
Each service has its own data structure.
In the end, we were not able to implement our customer’s favourable solution. Our first solution was one where the caption could stay the same for all services. 90% of our users use the same caption for all social media channels. Our current solution is unfortunately one where the caption had to be split.
Confirmation Modals
Instead of autosave
Due to technical complexities, we didn’t opt for an autosave solution. Instead, we used a save button and confirmation modals when exiting the composer. When creating a new post but not completing it, we leave the chance to save it as a draft. When editing a post and leaving the composer we doublecheck if the user wants to save or discard the changes.
Inline Messages
Problems ahead
Some limitations of social media platforms require attention from the user and cannot be fixed in the backend. Think of character count, video length or hashtag limitations. In those cases we use inline messaging
