over 7 years ago from Youlanda Kuo, Product designer at Funding Societies
I happened to find that Medium has changed their UI in their stories page. Now it's much more easy to like, share, comment...! What do you think?
Shrink your browser down to phone size and you can see how this design came about. This is mobile-first design taken a bit too far. Basically ignoring desktop size layouts.
Not a fan.
the sticky controls on the bottom are driving me crazy. those things always make me feel so claustrophobic
Absolutely right. Brutal.
oof, yeah you're right. I can't not look at it when I'm supposed to be reading.
I like moving the share and auxillary functionality from the corners into the middle, but the appeal of Medium for me was always that the article reading experience was so amazingly uninterrupted.
I wish they'd relegate this stuff down to a sidebar instead of covering the article.
Edit: I accidentally a word.
I agree with you. I think you meant uninterrupted, right?
I did.
Hmmm.. I thought the whole top area was a stylesheet caching issue, so I hard refreshed a couple of times.
But what do I know. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I did the same thing. Shrink your browser down to phone size and you can see how this happened. This is mobile-first web design taken too far.
I hate those sticky controls there. I get that they want to increase sharing and recommending, but this just feels all wrong to me.
yea, it's cool, I'm just not sure about putting the author/recs at the top above the cover image—think this has lowered the immersive feel of fullscreen covers significantly, for many, many articles... example
There was a vocal minority that asked for more author recognition. Unfortunately it takes away from the reading experience and looks uncharacteristically cluttered for Medium. I hope they revert, it looked great before.
How do you know? Care to elaborate? Esp. on that vocal minority part...
I used to follow someone on Medium, and their entire network had things they wanted changed. They were vocal about it, so I unfollowed.
Obnoxious.
I'm there to read and really enjoy reading on Medium.
You share or like something when........................
You've read the article.
Sharing is not "hard" on Medium. lol my god. Sharing and liking is earned.
You read an article, decide it's valuable and the control is there at the end. Easy enough.
Smashing that control persistently in someone's face before they have read the article encourages superficial sharing and likes, and makes people more prone to sharing or liking in response to headlines, 3 2 1, activate Buzzfeed Bingo.
It's a little weird but I think it's a smart move. You now (or probably soon will) have a nearly identical reading experience across most devices. It's a design that clearly prioritizes smartphone and tablet users, ~51% of web traffic (and probably even higher for Medium).
horrible, now when you land on the page, it is like you are trying to see the picture you put on your desk, but book, pens, and laptop are in the way. the image can't even remain a rectangle shape!
Love the way it works now. Quite intuitive for me )
One day, I wake up, open Medium, to find this. I think the new UI is way too intrusive, and really making me feel like "Hey, you don't belong here. Go somewhere else to read or save it to Pocket for reading".
Looks great!!
The only thing I feel bad with Medium UX and UI, is that I feel still inconfortable with there way to write and custom a story.
I like it. It's not massively intrusive and becomes really useful in those longer articles.
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