3 UX Features Medium Deactivated
Guest Contribution
And The Design Reasons Behind Their Deactivation
Iusually spend my Friday evenings knee-deep, rummaging through Medium’s age-old story archives. This time I found an interesting story, written by EPIC’s founder Joshua Davis. The story is titled “The Mercenary”.
This was one of those 2013 Medium classics that circualted the crap out on social media back in the day. It’s a feat for any designer’s eye. It also reminded me of some of the things that Medium Engineering had omitted over the years from their design arsenal.
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1. Centre alignment, oh I miss you so.
This feature disappeared in 2015. That’s 2+ years removed since it was last available to Medium writers. Why do I think they should bring it back?
Centre-alignment works perfectly for headlines and tag-lines.
Believe me, centre-aligning your headlines was HAWT back then. If you don’t believe me, then believe The Mercenary. Because centre alignment was what made this story rock!
But why did Medium disable this feature?
Simply because centre alignment does not work well for the story’s body. Centre-aligning the entire body of a story makes it look horrendous, and you wouldn’t want to that anytime soon. This is looks like when you decide centre-align everything.
And that is why Medium stuck with left alignment for taglines as well.
Because it’s is all about uniformity. Centre-aligning only the headlines and taglines makes no sense if the body is left aligned. This confuses the reader.
Users can read each line by simply moving their eyes to the left edge each time. This makes your paragraphs faster and easier to read because the user’s eyes don’t have to work as hard to find where the line starts each time.
It feels much more natural to the average reader.
Yet, I feel that centre-alignment works perfectly for headlines and tag-lines. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. This is something that I desperately wish the platform would bring back from the ashes.
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2. Words over full-screen pictures was hot back then!
Back in the day?—?pre-2015, I should say?—?screen width images had hidden trinkets for the designer’s eye.
With full-sized, screen-width images, you could superimpose your words over images! WOW. Just wow.
And now? I’m stuck with having my words over a clear white screen, with my screen-width images separate from all my words.
But why did Medium remove this feature?
Because it makes a ton of sense from a reader’s standpoint. Medium has fast become a platform ‘for the readers’, and I’m all for that. Reading on a white-coloured background brings much clarity and contrast to black coloured letters.
And how the hell would an average reader know which spectrum of colours worked best for black letters? For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s a designer’s perspective of which background colours to use for the best contrast.
Without this feature, the reader never has to worry about compromising the contrast of letters.
Enabling this feature would add much unneeded complexity to the art of writing, that has been made glaringly simple by Medium. Much too simple I must add. This simplicity is needed to focus on what is truly important.
Removing the focus on images and colours has increased the focus on the writing itself.
I can remember those few months that I spent tinkering on my self-hosted WordPress blog. I spent much more time deciding which fonts to use for my drop down menus and which colours to use for my headlines, and spent an ounce of my time on what mattered the most?—?my writing.
During that time I wrote only 10 stories. 10 stories during 2 months. Pathetic. Most of my time was spent meddling with the design interface of my blog. A blog that had 20-something visitors per month.
Now? I’ve shifted full time to Medium. I have 35,000+ visitors every month, 1.9k+ followers and I spend a bulk of my time writing. Not just writing, but experimenting with my writing.
I’ve experimented so much with my writing, that I’ve discovered previously unknown tastes as a creative. Tastes that I never knew existed within the depths of my own psyche. Amazing, I must say.
That is how omiting a small UI fuction changed my pesonality. Instead of meddling with the unnecessary, I began experimenting with the unknown. And I thank Medium for that.
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3. The last one : You could recommend any story on the PC, even over images.
What the hell is a ‘recommend’? I know, they call it claps now.
Back in the day?—?in the times of centre aligning and whatnot?—?the “clap” was humbly known as the “Recommend”. If you liked a Medium story, you could give it a heart. For those who don’t remember, it looked something like this :
And the ‘recommend’ function died in 2017. So to avoid any confusion, I’m going to call this function the ‘clap’ function.
And claps don’t work over images, anymore.
Back then, you could always recommend a story, no matter where you were within the story. I’m sure you’re not getting this. You’re probably wondering : “hey I can clap wherever, whenever I want, right now!”. Let me crush your optimism.
You can’t.
This is what happens when you try to clap for a story whilst hovering over a screen-width image or an outset image. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to work out. How do I know? Because I tried this out more times than I can possibly count.
See the clap button disappearing when moving over an image? Any image that comes in the way of the clap button makes it dissapear. I may not be the first one to notice this design effect, I’m sure.
Why the hell did Medium remove this feature?
Again, something to do with background colours. The clap/recommend button can come in different colours, depending on where you were reading the story.
If it is a self-published story, the clap button has the default green colour. If you’re reading the story under a Medium publication, the clap button comes in the publication’s accent colour.
And what is the best background colour to contrast any colour? WHITE. So Medium deactivated the ‘clap’ function when hovering over images, since images can have varied background colours.
Which also means that clapping can only be done if the button is not disrupted with a background image.
The solution? Use full column-width images.
Stick with full column-width images instead of the full screen-width and outset images within the body of their stories. This will make sure that the ‘clap’ button is eternally visible to the reader.
I’m not saying to never use full screen-width or outset image sizes. Rather, use them sparingly, with ample text inbetween. If you want to drop in a image here and there, make sure its full column-width.
If your story has multiple full screen-width images, the clap button will almost never be visible to your reader. Which means that your story will never get the number of claps it truly deserves.
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? Also, congrats on making it to the end! ?
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3 UX Features Medium Deactivated was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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