Redesigned for more connection

We’re working to make it easier to find, read, and follow what you love.

Medium Staff
The Medium Blog
3 min readSep 30, 2021

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Update: We’ve released this new experience to all users. For the latest on these changes, head here.

Medium is not just a writing platform, it’s a networked ecosystem where every story, writer, publication, and topic is connected to dozens of others. We’ve been working to make it easier to find meaningful content and connections; to make exploration and discovery easier.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been making changes to improve the app experience and if you haven’t seen them already, you will in the coming weeks. The next step is an evolution of the Medium web experience which will roll out over the next several weeks for logged-in users.

Reading a story on Medium can be a doorway to exploring ideas you care about. Now, you have more opportunities to do so: discover and follow authors and topics you love, share your point of view, and explore the variety of subjects, interests, communities, and hidden gems waiting to be discovered. Writers and their ideas are at the forefront of this experience. Alongside stories and profiles, you’ll see more information about the author, ways to connect with them, and links to explore related topics.

New navigation

Here are the three main elements of the new experience:

Easy access to everything you need

To start, we’re making it faster to get around Medium with a persistent, accessible navigation menu. It gives you quick access to core elements of your Medium experience — your home page, lists, notifications, account settings, and more.

A smoother, faster reading experience

We’ve made it easier than ever to discover stories and dive right into reading by expanding stories in place, without the page refreshing or a new one opening. Claps, responses, and bookmarks are always accessible at the bottom of your reading screen, a reminder that Medium is about reading and engaging.

More context and connection

Easily discover relevant context about what you’re reading — information presented on the right-hand side will update based on what you’re viewing in the center. On the home page, the right-hand side will help you discover content and writers you might like. On story pages, you’ll see more about the author, as well as have the opportunity to explore related topics and authors. On author profile pages, you’ll learn more about them, including their “about” information, a sample of who they follow, and easily access the lists they’ve created.

Over time, we will continue to evolve this space to make it easier to explore and discover what’s relevant to you.

We’re not done

We plan to roll out this experience over the next several weeks, with more enhancements after that. But with any big change, we expect to learn as we go — and a big part of that will be hearing from the readers and creators of Medium. So please let us know what you think and how it could be better.

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