Make Your Products Guilt-Free
De-constructing Medium’s product choices that make you feel good about yourself
Successful products make their users feel like winners. In the words of Kathy Sierra, good products help users become “baddass”.
Every choice Medium makes is about getting users to feel good. Here is an example. Why do people stop blogging? You start blogging with a lot of excitement and ideas, and after a few posts you get busy and stop writing for a while. After a while you feel guilty every time you look at it. Because every time you look at it you see the time stamp on your last post. You dread visiting your blog and it becomes a source of pain. It becomes yet another abandoned blog in the interwebs. What’s the medium’s solution to this phenomena? Get rid of the dates on stories completely.
Writing is not easy. You might be good at what you do. You might have lots of great ideas. But, turning stories, knowledge and ideas into writing is a hard skill that takes time and practice. Most people on Medium are trying to improve their writing. Medium’s guilt free approach helps them get better at writing.
Let’s deconstruct some of the choices Medium makes.
Beautiful Defaults
The articles look great by default. You need to work really hard to make an article look ugly. Good typography, lots of spacing and no distractions environment just creates a beautiful presentation for your posts.
No Dates on Posts
Medium does not show dates on story listings. Articles don’t contain dates at the top. Medium recently added dates to the bottom of the articles but they are tiny and you don’t see them until you read the whole article.
Stats
I made a good start at Medium but a personal tragedy knocked me out. I stopped writing for a long time. After 6 months of silence coming back to Medium and seeing my old stories still getting a few reads a day was a nice surprise. It was motivational and it helped me get back on writing.
Tracking number of people who read the posts is a great idea. You know that it is not only the search engine bots that are visiting your posts. Even one person reading something you have written is a good feeling. So, I love looking at the stats page and it motivates me to write more.
No Story Count
Medium does not show how many stories are on a user’s account or how many articles are in a collection. They might have done it to prevent clutter. But, the signal is there: it is not important how many stories you have; what matters is the quality of those stories.
Notifications with Good News
At Medium, the best way to get traffic to your writing is to get it accepted on a collection. So, it makes sense to apply to as many collections as you can find on the topic.
Medium never sends bad news. If you do not get accepted to a collection you do not get a rejection letter. And, when they send good news they turn it into a congratulations.
No “0 Comments”
Having no comments at the end of a story feels like nobody cares about it. Medium have comments but you usually comment on a paragraph within the post and these comments are hidden on the right side.
Recommendations
I use the recommend button to keep track of articles I really like so that I can re-read them in the future. That’s why getting even a single recommendation on one of my stories is very cool for me.
Medium has given me a new perspective on product design. Our goal should not only be about making simple, easy-to-use and beautiful products. We need to make our products motivational for our users. Make your products be like a good friend. Get users to feel good about themselves. Get them to feel successful. Get them to have a good time.
