Case Study — Medium; make us money without making us sell-outs

Emily Crittenden
Jul 20, 2017 · 6 min read

By Team Cheetos

The Medium Complex — how might we grow the user base of Medium and generate a profit with which to pay writers?

The Brief

Provide a new feature to justify monetising the Medium platform with a subscription model. That new feature should also attract more users to help grow the longterm business of the site and to generate capital with which to pay writers.

The Team

  • The End Product Guy (the project manager — the cool guy, tech savvy available for tech support 24/7, thinking about the final deliverable 2 minutes in).
  • The Stats Guy (the unofficial project manager — refer to for direction and reassurance)
  • The Perfectionist (debates one minor detail of wireframes for three hours until ‘The Stats Guy’ has forgotten his original position and its now 9pm).
  • The Lazy Creative (the rogue/lone ranger — push him for the details, squeeze out the poetry).
  • The Observer (middle management — reigning in the end product guy, settling the great debate over the wireframes, pinning down the lazy creative and squeezing him)

The Challenge

The Challenge lay in monetising Medium without compromising the brands values or philosophy, by reverting to the traditional advertising model, a model which founder, Ev Williams believes to be part of the problem with todays media channels. The notion that it is the quality of an idea that matters and that you don’t have to be a professional writer to voice it travels against the grain of traditional publishing. How might we make Medium an attractive site for users and encourage them to pay?

The underlying challenge in all of this was also endeavouring to work as a team of 5 UX designers.


My Role

My role was cross-functional on this project, I dipped into the research early on investigating trends and best practice in publishing and social media. We conducted interviews together and discussed options and ideation.

I then delved into directing the narrative of our presentation to create the story we wanted to tell about Medium to support our findings and sell the Medium story we wanted to tell.


User Research

To understand current users motivations behind engaging with Medium we conducted user interviews and created an online survey to gather Medium users thoughts about the platform.

One obstacle we encountered with the survey method was that the animosity of of an online survey provided an outlet for hostile or thoughtless responses. Passive aggression much?


Affinity Mapping

Affinity mapping; where team Cheetos learned some UX lessons of our own.

What a great idea! why isn’t everyone doing this?

Whilst the glossy appeal of a digital platform like real-time-board for organising our notes and having 24/7 access sounded appealing, the reality was that in the absence of a projector it was not practical organising 478 post-it notes on a 13 inch screen.

Cheetos first attempt at affinity mapping

Changing our tactic to affinity mapping a wall using the original post-it note technique and getting all our insights out in the open made it easier to group those behaviours and pain-points and establish their needs which were:

  • Its not easy to search for things - “the algorithm sucks’
  • ‘Medium lacks exclusive content’
  • ‘I don’t want to pay for Medium’
Cheetos second attempt at Infinity mapping; success!

Content strategy

Affinity mapping helped us identify insights which revealed that the current business goal didn’t align with user needs. In order to develop an effective content strategy we needed to consider if a traditional subscription really was the best option to implement and what type of feature based on that research would attract users to the platform.


Competitive Analysis

In the social media camp our Marketing man ran the figures and the truth was that Medium has some stiff competition against Facebook and Twitter. These sites are free and command a huge portion of the social media space and an enormous audience. However within those spaces advertising reigns supreme and Medium stands opposed to that model. Here lies opportunity.

Damn Facebook!

LinkedIn commands a more professional audience in the publishing space and was similar to Medium in the context of sharing articles.


Alternative Tools

We explored lego play as a tool to help unpack the ‘Medium Complex’.

It provided a creative way for everyone to communicate and we collaborated by merging our ideas to come up with our problem statement.

Medium as a window of opportunity and the

Problem Statement

Medium is not currently providing an intuitive user experience and its core values do not really align with the proposed likes of a subscription model.


How might we…

How might we improve Mediums value and content to inspire a self sustaining community.


Hypothesis

We believe that by offering exclusive content from influencers across multiple industries to members who sign up for free, in conjunction with a redesign of the site making it easier to use will achieve the business goal attracting more users.

We believe that a traditional subscription model goes against Mediums brand, however a donation model is something that is more inline with the brand and company values.


Personas

This led us to understanding the solution through use of personas.

From the user research we established three types of personas that use Medium and focused in on our primary persona, Toby Gosling (yep, he’s Ryan’s cousin), because Luke Warm ‘will never pay’ and we deduced that our professional Alannah would be an easier hook if the platform was monetised anyway. Toby’s more of a 1% kind of guy. He is an early adopter, part of the 1% of people that influence change across the majority. Toby’s our man.


User Flow

Okay, so how do we make the site attractive for Toby? We clean it up and make the User flow of becoming a member really easy as this very clean ordered sequence depicts.


Prototyping and Testing

We tested our paper prototype on a fully fledged UX designer - our instructor. She gave us a lot of positive feedback, but then the perfectionist in her came out and our result was defined by a complete pivot of where we were heading and a fresh design featuring more hierarchy.

Strategising

As you can see, strategising was a lot of fun

Emily Crittenden

Cat, Travel and Sub-Culture Enthusiast UX Designer

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Emily Crittenden

Written by

Emily Crittenden

Cat, Travel and Sub-Culture Enthusiast UX Designer

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