A More Helpful Medium
I’ve never written anything on Medium before today. I’ve definitely wanted to. As a designer, I’ve always been a big fan of their minimal interface and attention to detail. As such, I have kicked off various drafts that until today haven’t amounted to anything.
I’ve tried other writing tools as well. They all offer similarly minimal interfaces with the presumed goal of encouraging me to focus on writing instead of picking fonts and other similar distractions. And yet, with all the concentration these tools allow, I have yet to write anything whole, let alone anything good.
All of these tools help to remove distraction from the writing process; it’s just you, your keyboard, and the blinking cursor. But what happens when you get stuck, falling prey to Writer’s Block? This is where I think these tools should focus on next and where I think Medium is best-suited to do so.
How Medium could help
We’re used to companies tracking us online. They want to serve us targeted ads and optimize marketing sites for future visitors. Many apps track our behaviour to learn from us and ideally improve our experiences. Similar monitoring of our behaviour within Medium could be used to infer much about our writing habits, where they’re failing us, and how they could be improved.
Careful monitoring of our keyboard activity–how fast we type, how often we pause, etc–could be combined with our history of opening, closing, creating, saving, and deleting documents. This data could be further correlated with general location, time, and weather data, as well as other tracked data from other users. With this, Medium could determine when we get stuck and try to help before we give up.
The instant Medium decided you were stuck–and before you decided to abandon your writing–it could quietly introduce a helpout (a helpful callout) with some small bit of advice, inspiring quote, quick game, or other short exercise known to help people write. These suggestions would all be integrated within the helpout, letting you stay close by your blinking cursor.
The success and failure of these helpouts could also be tracked and measured. If no keyboard input was detected–or if you closed the document–after dismissing the helpout, it would be scored lower so it appeared less frequently or under different conditions in the future; if instead you began writing (or better yet, published the document), it would be scored higher. Similar data collected from other users would also help Medium determine which suggestions were performing better than others.
While performance tracking of these helpouts would help, they’d still rely on generalized solutions, many of which may not be of much help to any specific person. This is where your friends come in.
How Medium could help us help us
Medium has already made an inroad into this territory by letting you share a link to your draft with your friends. This allows them to jump in and leave notes on your document with advice, corrections, or words of encouragement. This kind of feedback is likely more helpful than any generalized solution Medium could automatically serve you. However, by combining your friends’ feedback with the data collection described above, Medium could intelligently call upon your friends for help, only serving those generalized solutions when they’re unavailable.
When Medium detected you were stuck, it could call out to your friends for help (this could work automatically if you allowed it or prompt you with a manual button). Once they accepted your request for help, they could jump into your document to help you in real-time. Here, they could engage you with live co-editing, instant messaging, or the same inline notes already offered.
If you don’t have anyone online to help, or if they’re all unavailable, you could instead broadcast your request to a general broadcast feed hosted by Medium. Here, other Medium users could monitor a feed of help requests from fellow users (and could presumably opt-in for notifications). These requests, besides saying who you are, could show a snapshot of your document and we’re you’re stuck. Then, just like your friends, they could jump in, requesting permission to view your document and attempt to help.
Spreading the word
Finally, to encouarge their community to use the feature and help each other write better and more often, Medium could provide an optional footnote including the names of everyone who jumped in to help you push through and publish your document.
