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How Medium is Improving its Writer and Reader Experience

We’ve cleaned up our in-product messaging prompts.

1. Removed full-screen pop-ups (aside from our paywall).

The first step of our tidying up project was to remove full-screen prompts on free stories, full stop. These were our most intrusive units, because they looked/felt like ads, and unnecessarily interrupted the reading experience on stories that could otherwise be read for free.

We’ve removed these full-screen pop-ups.

2. Redesigned our “meter” (our member-only content messaging) to take up much less space.

On Medium, some of our content is “member-only,” meaning unlimited access to these stories requires a paid subscription. You can enjoy a limited number of member-only stories for free each month, before encountering a paywall where we prompt you to subscribe to continue reading. To let you know you’re reading member-only content, and to let you know how many stories you have left, we include messaging in-product (often known as “the meter”). Although this messaging is important, the way we were serving this messaging was not optimal. Our meter notification was quite large, often taking the form of partial or full-screen prompts that needed to be dismissed to continue reading. Recently, we redesigned our meter to be far more minimal (see below), and provides a point of education, versus interruption, in the reader experience.

Our “meter” is now streamlined.

3. Redesigned our “open in app” prompts to be less intrusive, more user-friendly.

The Medium app (on iOS and Android) is the best way to read Medium on a mobile device, so making it easy for readers to download our app, or open a story in the app, is hugely important. However, if someone chooses not to download the app, or doesn’t want to read in-app, we completely respect that decision. Previously, we had a persistent “open in-app” pop-up prompt at the top of every story, that even after being dismissed would often (and annoyingly) appear again. We’ve since replaced this pop-up with native messaging in our top navigation bar (see bottom right), and are continuing to optimize our “open in app” prompts to serve them to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

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