Medium, So Simple It Hurts (Literally)
Don’t let Medium’s beautiful design fool you — the writing environment can leave you more frustrated than writer’s block.
When my colleagues and I started this publication a few months ago, we had decided to write on Medium over Wordpress, Squarespace, LinkedIn, and others. Medium met the bill on a number of dimensions, including:
- Distribution — if our content is entertaining and relevant, then organic discovery can occur through Medium’s platform. Under our own domain, we would have to rely on social and other referral traffic to get eyeballs — that’s hard work.
- Collaboration — given that there are multiple contributing writers, we needed a platform that allows us to easily share posts and collaborate on a topic while maintaining our own voice.
- Quality — several organizations, including Medium, have professional writers and experts curating high-quality content in publications. Think of Medium as the longer form of Quora, where content comes from voices of authority — and we strive to create a brand of expertise for our publication.
After 3 months of writing on Medium (granted, this will be my 3rd post), the platform has met our needs — mostly. I’ve always admired Medium for how beautiful it is as a product, but as I’ve been using it more I’ve also developed a love/hate relationship with the writing environment. Though not explicitly stated in our initial requirements, I had assumed that writing on Medium would be both frictionless and minimalist (distraction free). Boy, was I wrong.
Frictionless and minimalism are related but not necessarily the same. Often they are conflated which can lead to design debates that are difficult to resolve. — Steven Sinofsky, Board Partner @ a16z
Where’s the onboarding?
Onboarding in mobile has been all the rage — especially for unfamiliar interactions, which is why it’s always a pleasant surprise when companies decide to give desktop apps awesome onboarding experiences. The one that Slack created is gold medal worthy, providing help to the user in an unobtrusive way. Medium, on the other hand, throws the user right to into the action. Though it’s simple enough to find the “Write a Story” icon, things get a little fuzzy from there on.
Medium chooses to leave the most helpful tidbits and tricks in its publications The Story and About Medium, but it wasn’t so clear how to find these publications. While it may be simple to omit onboarding altogether, it only works when the app is truly frictionless (ie. Uber) — which is not the case when dealing with Medium’s writing environment.
Medium is a beautiful space for reading and writing — and little else. The words are central. They can be accompanied by images to help illustrate your point. But there are no gratuitous sidebars, plug-ins, or widgets. There is nothing to set up or customize. — Ev Williams, Founder @ Medium
Simplicity at its best/worst
One of Medium’s best and most frustrating assets is its “distraction free” editor. It’s so uncomfortably simple that it threw me off the first time I started a post. Once you get started, though, it’s as simple as writing in Notepad — no frills, nada. Highlighting texts bring up little snippets that helps you format.
The most frustrating and distracting part, though, was adding the beautiful cover photos (and other multimedia) that other writers have used. As a habit, I often type in my thoughts prior to adding images and photos. This habit happened to work completely against Medium’s design — as soon as I typed in the title, the + button disappears to my dismay. It was like playing hide and seek, except I was chasing a ghost. In fact the button didn’t catch my attention until 15 minutes later, after I had a mental meltdown. I mean, what is a more compelling call-to-action? Text that asks the user to input the title and “Tell your story…”, or an innocent looking + button?
In a recent interview with re/code, Ev Williams suggested that other users are experiencing similar pains:
In my opinion, it’s almost too sparse — in fact, we did a redesign of the navigation late last year, and it’s a little less sparse. We put more things on the page because we realized it was too cryptic. So it will always be our main focus to build the best user experience possible, but a lot of people are sometimes, like, “well, there’s nothing there.” Like, “I’m confused.” And so we tried to correct for that. — Ev Williams, Founder @ Medium
Don’t get me wrong, Medium is a great ecosystem to be a part of — especially as its network continues to grow — it’s just that some of the product’s minimalist design introduces unnecessary friction for first-time writers. In an interesting recap of Medium’s design in the early days, a screenshot shows that the “Add Feature Image” icon was front and centered (only if!). Perhaps I’m the 0.1% user who gets stuck on an intuitive feature, or perhaps such design change made little impact to the retention of Medium’s new users — whatever it might be, it’s great to see the evolution of a company that is obsessed about UX and simplifying lives. I just hope it’s not at the expense of frictionless.
