Critiquing Design — Product Management
Medium Homepage
I will use the following design criteria to evaluate Medium Homepage.
- Is it innovative?
- Is it useful ?
- Is it understandable ?
- It is honest ?
Before that, let’s look at Medium homepage and as it appears to me.
Medium homepage showcases a list of readings which are based on my reading history on Medium, and as far as it appears, most times the articles which are shown on the homepage are closely related to what would attract my interest. Hence, the algorithm behind it works well. All articles have “Dismiss the Story” has “Action” button, which helps the article recommendations for me. Infinite scrolling helps Medium to get more user engagement as well.
Getting articles recommended related to my reading history and what I might want to read is the mainstay of Medium homepage and is definitely useful. The snippet of each article gives me information about how much time will it take for me to read it without necessarily going into the article itself. This especially for a user who is a free use is helpful since, once I open an article to read Medium considers it a part of “Read” 3 articles of the month for free users. On hovering on it, it also gives me the last update time, which is hidden from the plain sight. They have given importance to the statistics which as a reader I will find interesting. Articles in the the section which forms the part of infinite scroll, have its source mentioned on the top which clarifies for the user why a certain article is recommended.
However, the titles on the Header such as OneZero, or Elemental which I think are different Medium publications are not useful to me since most times I am on the homepage itself. In addition, these titles are not understandable, they do not tell me what these topics are about. The topmost section above the infinite scroll one which is separated using a separator doesn’t tell me clearly why are those articles separated out from the ones below. On the right there is a separate section with title Reading List, it would not be clear for a user why these articles are separately pointed out as Reading List vs. other articles in other sections. Other features added such as bookmarking one, is useful as well as understandable.
Lastly, Medium does a good job in doing one thing which is making interesting articles to read available to its users as per what they might want to, and using wisdom of the crowd to show which ones are actually good. In this respect Medium’s layout and its simple aesthetics along with features offered on homepage is very honest and retains functional form.
