Stories, Context, and Connectivity

Medium Stats Page: circa 2016

(some thoughts on the beta)

I was lucky to be a 1 in 10 that signed into the system on the right day. I forget which day, but it was a few days ago. I was rewarded with the beta version of the stats page. I’ve been looking closely at it. No surprise there!

Maybe it’s already out of beta, doesn’t matter. I still have some thoughts to share. I’m no techie, so I’m going to come at this from a user perspective…and these are my opinions, they only matter if you want them to.

Supersize my comments here on data design with Edward Tufte’s 4 book bundle. He’s the Leonardo da Vinci of data visualisation. You can thank me later…

On the off chance Medium don’t let you buy actual books and you do want to hear my perspective, I’ve compiled a short list of ideas and comments.

Stories always matter.

One thing I learned from Tufte, the importance of telling a story with the data, is at the heart of great stats reports. This can mean lots of things, but it mostly means presenting the data in ways that beg us to engage.

This can be as simple as colourful diagrams or as tricky as the use of icons and pictures on a background which also consists of data. I would love to see a humanistic data page on Medium. I’m imagining coffee cups, papers, and the like to make the minutes meaningful.

And like all good stories…what you leave out can make what you leave in mean so much more.

Context is everything.

This is probably the most important idea to consider when building the page. When I look at the page now, I don’t see much context. I see the context of 30 days or my stories in a battle for the top spot. Not really a textured landscape.

Context really starts with questions, not assertions. So here are some questions I would ask to provoke a contextual symphony:

1. How do my stories compare with my peers?
2. Who are my peers?
3. How do they compare with similar stories?
4. Where is my traffic coming from?
5. When are people reading my stories?
6. What countries love my stories?
7. Which stories have the most comments?
8. How is my engagement? (responses on/to)
9. Who are my readers?
10. What types of writing matter to my readers?

I’m trying to be a bit obtuse with my questions — hopefully sparking your imagination. I’ve probably left out few as well.

Connectivity Matters Most.

All the talk on Medium is about connecting people and engagement and attention. Yet, the stats page is all about me. Adding the minutes of reading time begins to move away from me, but it’s still a stat page engineered to pump me up.

Could the stats page be the most human place on Medium?

I dunno, but I think you guys are clever — so I’m sure if you threw the dashboard idea out the window, you’d create something remarkable.

I’m imagining a place that tells a contextual story about the impact of my stories on my readers. I’d love to look at the stats page and be invited into a hundred or thousand different worlds — my readers’ worlds. If I can see at a glance how and who I’m connecting with, I’m pretty sure my curiosity will take me on some cool adventures across Mediumland.

*BTW: maybe all this starts by changing the name of the page.