Flipboard Pre-populated Text

✋ What is it?

This is a solution found in the Flipboard Browser Extension (In this case Chrome). When users share a link through the Flipboard extension, and they have a text selected in the page, Flipboard will pre-populate the comment field the selected text.

🤲 How does this interaction or solution work?

Flipboard is a news aggregator tool that allows users to consume curated magazines created from different sources. Publishers and users can create curated magazines by pushing articles from various sources to the platform.

One of the tools that Flipboard provides to allow users to push comment to the platform is a browser extension that quickly generates a sharing dialogue from any page in which is triggered.

When a user triggers the extension Flipboard will generate a preview of the article, that usually includes the title of the articles and one of the photos found in the body of the article.

There's also a comment/description field, where the user can add additional context, a summary or an opinion.

If a user selects a portion of text within the body of the article and then triggers the extension, Flipboard will automatically pre-populate the comment field with the selected text.

🙌 How does this interaction or solution work?

Reducing Friction and Automation

One common behavior, when users and publishers share news or articles in social media, is to quote excerpts of the article in the body of their posts.

Flipboard simplifies and reduces the friction that comes from having to manually copy and paste the excerpt from the article to the social media entry, by automatically pre-populating any selected text within the article itself.

This behavior increases the usefulness of the browser extension by significantly reducing the time it takes to push the content of the article and help Flipboard to increase the amount of content that is published in their platform.