How might we help people turn their ideas into words?

TL;DR: As part of Cornell Tech’s product studio, which is led by Greg Pass, leland rechis and J McLoughlin, my team members and I have suggested a killer feature for helping Medium’s users deliver high quality articles in less effort, reduced time and minimal distraction. Our InVision prototype can be found in the end of this article.

Typical user flow on Medium.com

Writing is hard. Turning ideas into words is even harder. For this exact reason and as part of Cornell Tech’s product studio, my team members and I have been challenged by Medium to help people turn their ideas into words.

In order to tackle this challenge, we have decided not to jump into solutions before we fully understand the full picture of Medium and its various type of users. Therefore, we started researching who exactly is struggling with turning ideas into words on Medium.

People

People have many ideas in their heads. During the user research we have made we discovered that thinking of ideas is actually very natural to a lot of people. News, books, movies, TV shows, theater and art are all great sources of inspiration that drive creativity among people.

Ideas can lead to infinite possible results. Personal experience can generate a great idea to a book, major worldwide event might lead to a movie and self problem solving can possibly lead to a new startup. In our mission, we are focusing on ideas that lead to written outputs, specifically short articles just like in Medium.

So we are focusing on people who find it hard for them to turn their ideas into words. Those are our actors.

Breakdown of Medium’s users, why it’s hard for them to write and HMW (how might we) help them

Now when we know who are the actors we want to understand what make it so hard for them to turn their ideas into words, specifically short articles. Therefore, during our user research we have discovered 4 main reasons that block people from turning their ideas into words.

Main reasons for not turning ideas into words

Distraction
When you have an idea it is usually something that needs to be developed through an online research. In our user research we found that most people capture their ideas in an online/offline notes and then start researching on the web for further information that can help reject or approve their idea. However, we also found that many people notice that when you continue researching you can easily get distracted by either social networks or another interesting information on the web. Distraction is a big deal when it comes to writing. Some might say that distraction is the enemy of writers because it creates chain reaction leading to serious time consuming and reduce productivity.

Lack of time
Writing takes time. Writing on Medium takes even more time because you want people to have incentive to read your articles and share them so you have to make it super engaged (big wide beautiful high definition photos) and very informative (relevant quotes and online statistics). In our user research we found that writing on Medium intimidates many people because they don’t have enough time to ensure that their article would be good enough to be shared a lot.

Laziness
See the above paragraph and add Laziness to the equation. Yes, people are lazy and want immediate, fast and high quality results. This scenario is not possible when it comes to writing on Medium.

Lack of confidence
One of my favorites writers on Medium is Jon Westenberg. Not only has he published one of the best articles ever but also somehow manage to deliver high quality, well written articles every couple of days. When you see such talent on Medium you get to think How can I be more like Jon?

Crafting a solution

So we are focusing on specific types of users having a few types of issues preventing them from turning their ideas into words. Yes, it is still very vague :).

How do we craft a solution that fits all Medium’s users including those who are still stuck on drafts? We think out loud a lot and come up with crazy, conservative, boring and exciting solutions. Oh, and we iterate it, a lot.

This board has been erased so many times…

Machine Learning algorithms, Natural Language Processing and Virtual Reality are all cool advanced tools that might even be the best for solutions. However, we have taken a decision to focus on current Medium’s users who are used to the current minimal (and beautiful) user experience.

Our guiding focus for solving this challenge is that Medium’s users get distracted, perhaps lazy, might not have enough time to write and possibly suffer from lack of confidence to write. After hours of brainstorming we decided on the following approach (or wedges when speaking Cornell Tech’s language):

1. We want to keep users in Medium’s platform when they are writing

2. We want to make it easier to populate articles with rich media

So instead of opening new tabs in your browser to start researching in the middle of a writing process, we want to have the ability to research while writing the article without exiting Medium’s editor. We suggest the following user experience:

1. Highlight a word/words
2. Use the same existing UX of highlighted tooltip by adding a ‘lightbulb’ button
3. Click on that ‘lightbulb’ button opens a tooltip with automatic relevant pulled information from multiple online data sources (Other medium articles, Google search, Wikipedia, Qoura, YouTube etc.).
4. Choose an artifact from suggested one in the tooltip
5. Drag the chosen artifact to either the article or ‘save for later’ sidebar

DEMO

This is not Michael Bloomberg you know :-)

Your feedback is the most important. Please let us know what do you think of our suggestion. We would appreciate any comment/suggestion/feedback from anyone!