Responses on Medium

Medium has been an inspiration for many designers lately. It’s a well thought and beautifully executed site. Medium’s use of Progressive disclosure (an interaction design technique) amongst many other design principle stuns me! But sometimes overusing a design principle may have its own setbacks. I have come across this one peculiar problem on Medium, which I would like to address here.

On May 16th, Sketch wrote a blog introducing its next version. As always, once I read the blog, I shot over to the Response section because previously I had faced some nasty bugs due to the updates! Once I opened the responses section I realized my intuition was right. I wanted to investigate more and kept reading through the responses. One such response caught my attention. A user had mentioned something which I use regularly.

I was disheartened to read the response but still hoped it wasn’t true. I saw there was a response to this response.

I hoped it would say that the feature was still there and the user might have missed it out. I clicked on it to read more. This is where it led me.

As you can see, what I expected was the response but I was led to this! I wasn’t able to find the response! I scrolled a little and saw Show all responses.

Although I was horrified to read the response; what got me agitated was the way Medium treated its responses section. Medium is a blogging site and responses are an integral part of the whole blogging symphony, isn’t it? This is where people voice out their opinions. It’s where other point of views regarding an article emerge and are discussed. Why would they treat it this bad?

When the response link led me to another page; I was still reconciling with the fact that they didn’t want it to be messy. But when I realised that the response was also hidden (which I found after scrolling) got me irritated. Moreover, the links to the other articles were above the response and I had to scroll to find it.

I believe Medium could definitely do a better job here. I understand the magic of Progressive disclosure. I am an advocate of it myself. But overusing it may make users irritated and someone like me, who already read a bad news more agitated.

I was told by many of my colleagues that they faced the same problem. One of them even mentioned that this has been addressed to Medium before which lead me here. Even though Medium treats responses as an individual story, I fail to understand why I have to scroll and open the responses section to read the response which I already showed interest in reading.

I hope Medium fixes this soon.