Medium.com on a mobile phone

Things you can’t simply expect to work as you’re used to on the desktop.

Due to nature of my software development work and my curiosity I mildly tested Medium.com user experience on:

• Chrome on Android
• IE on Windows phone
• Safari on iOS

I’ve mostly tested on Android as it’s also most widely used platform.

What works

The usual parts work as expected. You access main home page and articles get listed nicely and more importantly very much phone optimised as they display at 100% magnification without the possibility of being enlarged or reduced. This makes it feel as if you’re using a native app, especially on Android where apps tend to have higher visual variety of all platforms.

But beware of doing anything else than simply reading articles as it may come with several surprises you may not expect.

Reading existing notes

This is something that I was mostly interested about as mobile phones don’t provide much horizontal space when viewed in portrait mode. You’ll be pleasantly surprised that existing notes display nicely at the bottom of screen over the content when one can flick through them horizontally. Very nice solution that works platform wide.

What doesn't work

Certain things don’t go according to plan and with some I really wonder why. Some platforms may work others may fail.

Closing main menu

When you try to open main menu in Chrome on Android it opens nicely with animation as expected, pushing content to the right out of the view, but it’s not possible to close it afterwards no matter how hardly one tries to touch content part.

Interestingly enough IE on Windows Phone works as expected in this regard.

Adding notes

Mainly this doesn’t work, as you’d need a mouse to hover over paragraphs. But as you likely already know Medium.com’s notes also work on individual text selections (may be whole paragraphs if one decides so). So if you try to select text and hope for note taking you’ll be surprised that this feature on works on Safari on iOS. Both other platforms display default system menu for text selection. Safari is the only browser that automatically adds the Add a note to the bottom of the screen where you can add a new note.

It should also be noted that those [+] balloons that display on hover on the computer desktop browser are briefly displayed on Chome on Android when you flick scroll a page. But for the love of God I wasn’t able to click any.

Going forward

If you have any insights of your own to add to the list, feel free to leave a note. I’ll be glad to add them here so we can help Medium.com’s stuff provide valuable feedback.