Two Suggestions for Improving the Medium User Experience

Don’t get me wrong, the Medium platform is fantastic. It is extremely accessible, flexible and intuitive. It’s easy to get up and running so that you can begin writing and publishing content quickly. I think, however, that some minor improvements could be made.

I wanted to offer these suggestions because this past week I created a publication on Medium. I was able to create the publication with no problems, but I found the process of submitting content to the publication to be a little confusing and counter intuitive.

There are 2 things which I think can be improved:

1. The instructions for submitting content to a publication.
2. The Actions/Help dropdown button for submitting content to a publication.

Lets begin with improving the instructions for submitting content to a publication. The screenshot below shows what the instructions currently look like.

As shown in the in the second list item of the screenshot above, directing the user to go to the symbol “…” does not seem very intuitive to me. I can’t make a connection between that symbol and the UI buttons that exist in the menu that are in the header of the Medium site.

Instead, as illustrated in the screenshot below, the icon of the button that the user needs to click on should be shown(in this case the Actions/Help dropdown button located in the menu next to the Publish button):

It would be easier to recognize the Actions/Help dropdown button icon shown above as opposed to “…”.

Since the image would be common in both the instructions and menu, it would be easier to make the visual connection:

Lets next talk about improving the look of the Actions/Help dropdown menu button itself. Here again is the current button:

A couple of things could use some improvement. I think that first the three dot icon in the button needs to be done away with. There is too much guesswork involved. Three dots tell the user nothing about what the button is supposed to do, and forces the user to expend extra effort by clicking the button to finally find out what it does:

So from the screenshot above we see that the dropdown menu finally displays what the button does. As shown above, you basically have a list of actions under the heading Actions as well as a Help section on the bottom of the menu.

I think to make it clearer, the first action under Actions, called Add to publication, should have its own green button, as I believe it carries the same weight as the Publish button. A user is either publishing a post independent of a publication or submitting that post to a publication. So why should one publishing action be visible and obvious to the user while the other publishing action is hidden until it can be revealed through an extra click? The Add To Publication button could be located next to the Publish button, so the user instantly knows where to go if they want to publish posts to a publication of their choice.

The rest of the actions could stay under the Actions/Help dropdown button. The title of the button could change from “…” to Actions. The Help section of the dropdown menu could also be separated out to have its own button, so that the user quickly knows where to go for help.

To make things clearer lets look at some screenshots. First we have the original menu with Share, Publish and the Actions/Help dropdown menu button unexpanded:

I think the above menu could be more intuitive if it was modified to look like this:

For the expanded menu comparison we again have the original menu buttons, this time with the Actions/Help button expanded:

Then we have the modified version below, this time with two dropdown menus, one for each now separated section (Actions and Help) that now fall under their own buttons respectively:

There is plenty of room in the site header to add the extra buttons, and I think separating the different button functions out would make usability a lot easier and intuitive. This is just my two cents though, based on my personal experience using Medium the last few days. Opinions may of course vary.

Chances are no one may have gone through the same confusion that I went through. Then again, others may have gone through this confusion already. Hopefully these suggestions may be beneficial and may give ideas to Medium for adopting a more intuitive UI design in the future.