Winter 2019
Medium Redesign
Where does one start when trying to redesign an already well designed app? By asking its users of course.
Winter 2019
Where does one start when trying to redesign an already well designed app? By asking its users of course.
Medium is a online publishing platform where users can both read and publish written works. Promoting itself as a humanist platform, it serves as a valuable hub for ideas, stories, and perspectives across a wide range of topics and industries.
For this project, my team and I performed a conceptual redesign of the Medium mobile app. While the results weren't put into production, we treated the experience as if our designs would go live.
Product Designer
User Researcher
My team and I were tasked with redesigning Medium according to the design process. We were to conduct our own research, synthesize the insights we discovered, then design based on that new knowledge. We were then to test and refine our designs, finishing the sprint with a working prototype to present to our stakeholders.
Our initial research took the form of looking into app store reviews, a competitve analysis, and a heuristic evaluation of the existing product. From this, we discovered a preliminary pain point, which was that some users were frustrated with Medium’s paywall. A few App store reviewers were quite vocal in that they thought it was absurd that Medium charged users when there was so much free content available on the web.
Additional early takeaways
-All major competitors had a trending section.
-Reddit makes finding multiple topics easy for the user by having them accessible from the homepage.
-Horizontal scroll at the top of Pinterest’s homepage allows the user to quickly navigate through the various different topics they’re interested in.
User interviews
We spoke to the following users to get a sense for how their experience was using medium and how they thought it might be improved:
Talking to users quickly led us to five key themes:
Its worth noting that the users we interviewed didn't once mention the paywall. This brought us to an interesting conversation, with our limited time, do we solve for existing users or prospective users? We chose to focus on the problems of existing users as the bulk of our first hand data came from this group.
Now that we had clearly identified specific user problems, we jumped into a design studio. Our team came up with 24 unique designs that all solved the users’ problems in their own ways.
Since we had limited time to enact our ideas, we charted them on an MVP priority matrix which allowed us to further refine our scope.
As you can see from the matrix, we chose to design the following:
-Topic shortcuts/buttons
-Creating a Following section
-Building out the existing "Reading List" feature
-A side scrolling top navigation
-Creating a trending section
-A publication section
Initial wireframes
Our team conducted two rounds of usability testing.
The first round told us we were on track. The users aced the prompts we gave them well within the click counts and time allotment for the tasks.
However, we know nothing is perfect, so we resolved to dig deeper in the second round, which resulted in actionable feedback–one user was unable to notice the top navigation.
To remedy this we decided to increase the font size and margins of the top navigation to better fit it within the space and make it more noticable.
Through careful user research and design thinking, we were able to provide Medium users with the following improvements:
Revamped Content Delivery
Augmented Organizational Capacity
Greater Ownership of the Experience
Given more time our team would start with a third round of testing to see if our larger navigation bar helped the users identify it easier. Additionally, we would like to revisit our MVP priority matrix and start iterating on some of our ideas that we had had to pass up because of time.
