The Destruction of The Best Writing Experience on the Internet

A Reaction to Medium.com’s New Editor

Whenever a software company changes their software there are inevitable complaints from those who have learned to use it. The company generally gives people time to adjust, and does its best to listen to but ultimately ignore their groans until the adjustment time is over.

However, sometimes, the groans are with good reason. Sometimes software is changed for the worse. Medium’s editor was revelatory; the best writing experience on the internet, in my opinion. It’s been changed.

Yes the title of this post is hyperbolic. This is my catharsis. Let the groaning begin.

Opinionated vs. Unopinionated Software

Medium’s editor was opinionated. There were only certain ways to begin your article, certain interface styles that were possible, and it encouraged a particular ‘look’ that felt unique to Medium.

Medium is now explicitly backing away from opinionated software. Their ‘new features’ blog post states:

“We have redesigned the Medium editor to get our ideas of how you should create out of the way and allow more flexibility to format your story in a manner that is unique to you.”

That is positive spin for ‘we are moving towards unopinionated software’. However the highly opinionated nature of the Medium editor is what made it great. Opinionated software is easiest to make usable because you can limit user choice and thus user confusion. It makes it easy to follow what I call ‘Do One Thing Well’.

Unopinionated software is billed as more ‘flexible’. But flexibility comes at the high cost of usability. I lost four drafts trying to write this post because of the confusing nature of the new editor, and I’m a software architect and UX professional.

Medium.com’s success, in my opinion, is solely due to the ease-of-use of its editor. Anyone could make beautiful posts with little cognitive investment. You could choose it over other editors and services because usability was more valuable than flexibility.

If a web-based content editing software is moving towards flexibility, that means it has to beat the ultimate flexible platform, Wordpress. Why try to compete in that space? Why not beat Wordpress by being easier to use?

Moving towards flexibility over usability is a step towards becoming just a lesser, widgetless, Wordpress wannabe.

Software That Is Your Graphic Designer

One of Medium.com’s big appeals for me was building something beautiful without having to do the graphic design work. I could upload a good, royalty free image that matched my article, and even set a color overlay without having to open photoshop.

It gave you the feeling that you were doing design without doing the heavy lifting, and it was always good-looking no matter what you did. A non-designer could put out something that felt like a designer made it. That was beautiful user experience.

Medium has discontinued the color overlay option. It is now far more complex and confusing to place header images (and headers and titles themselves). The little UX touches for article introductions that made Medium’s editor stand out from the crowd have been whittled away in the interest of ‘flexibility’.

These changes increase the necessary skill to build something beautiful. That is beneficial only to entrenched publishing houses, not the masses. Most people can’t afford a graphic designer; having software that did at least some of that work for you was a gift, now gone.

Discoverability vs. Memorization

Astonishingly, Medium seems to have taken a page from Windows 8 in their UX design. Take another look at their ‘new features’ blog post: https://medium.com/the-story/new-editor-features-title-images-and-more-5588495ec3c0. Notice how many things you just have to ‘know’. It begins to sound like a Windows 8 tutorial full of undiscoverable gestures and actions that you have to memorize to use.

Don Norman in his updated seminal work ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ uses the phrase ‘feed-forward’, as a complement to ‘feedback’. The idea is that indicating how to take an action is just as important as indicating the results of an action. The new editor has highly reduced its feed-forward indicators.

To use UX vocabulary: there are more affordances, but less perceived affordances and less signifiers. That means the editor can do more, but tells you how less. Features are far less discoverable, and require much more memorization. Memorization is mildly acceptable UX only if the software is used daily. I don’t write on Medium every day and I can’t imagine many others do.

Now, How Do I Save This

I wrote this article and realized I had no way to save it. I tried opening the side bar, but that just asked me for my ‘alternate title’. (Yes, some kind of ‘alternate title’ for listings, which feels like an attempt at enabling search engine keyword bait. I’m confused as to why this was a need.)

I tried entering values in the sidebar thinking it would force an autosave. Then I tried to leave the page and it told me I had ‘unsaved changes’, and provided no way to save them. If you are reading this it means I sat and waited for autosave to kick in. ‘Frustrating’ is the opposite of usable.

Groaning, Moaning, and Complaining

Why all the moaning? Only because I loved Medium’s editor. I am struggling to imagine why they would implement these changes. Perhaps pressure from established publishers who want to publish things on Medium in a format more in line with their branding? I’m not sure.

As a software architect I try to accept changes to software I use. Eventually you get used to them. But these changes fundamentally change the editor’s personality. Over time, sure, you can learn and still use the software — but will I enjoy it as much? Will new users stick around to figure it out? Personally I don’t think so.

I hope Medium will choose to believe that its design opinions were good ones, and give us easier ways to do things again. Perhaps at least let us choose between ‘our design’ and ‘your design’ per article. Something. Anything. Anything other than a ‘read this documentation first’ design.

Medium showed us what an online editor could be. For me Medium has been the best place to write on the internet, period. Losing that, I think, is worth complaining about.

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