5 ms·

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color.

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades. - I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog. - Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account. - In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable. - When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment. - There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating. - Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading. As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts. If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.

geoka9 10y ago
> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...
- glitchdout 10y ago
  It's even worse when it's a sticky header. In those cases when you hit the "Page Down" key the content is covered by the header and you have to press "Up" a few times to read it.
mrwilhelm 10y ago
>>> so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.
- stonogo 10y ago
  I'm not changing my browsing habits because Medium's engineers suck at sending text.
knight17 10y ago
>> I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates. It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts. Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side. Example: I am on this page (https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.html https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.h...) and I can see all his posts without leaving the current page which I arrived from Google. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5 http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5 [1]: Some have list pages which is great. It only requires one extra click [2]: Not to mention the humongous page sizes [3]: Evernote killed Clearly
elcapitan 10y ago
> In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. I save almost all Medium posts to Instapaper and read them there, for the same reason, and because it makes it much easier to read.
Traubenfuchs 10y ago
They went all out with JavaScript overengineering. On mobile devices I don't want to use it at all.
- mercer 10y ago
  Is it a speed thing, or mostly a UX thing that bothers you?
  - Traubenfuchs 10y ago
    Using an iPhone 5S with the latest iOS I have caught a handful of behaviors that are clearly bugs, everything else is just the rumbling of a grumpy person with lots of personal opinions about web stuff. Some complaints are not even mobile related. - Performance is fine. It's not great, but it's ok. - Sometimes when I open an article/blog post and can start scrolling already it will push be back to the top. The virtual version of getting tripped up in real life. - The bottom bar is uncomfortable. It adds zero value and adds bloat. On my iPhone 5S the SMS icon touches the Open in app button. Don't get me started on the desktop version with two bars. By the way, the useless and annoying black box that (probably lets you highlight text appears above the top bar when both are visible. I can only guess what the buttons in the black box do, they don't have tooltips. - Try zooming in and out. Things start spazzing around with bad performance, text momentarily becomes white/invisible. The bottom bar is zoomed in too, becoming unusable moving around slowly depending on where I have scrolled. I am convinced nobody ever even tried out zooming in and out. A cheer for attention for details! - If you start scrolling down, the top bar containing topic appears, but without its white background. The white background only appears once you stop your scrolling. - Sometimes I "catch" the blurry, lazy loading images. I don't want to see that many seconds after I opened an article. - Confusing navigation: Many articles lead you to other Medium sites with different top menu choices. - The app shoehorning makes me feel like there is a lack of confidence in the web application.

geoka9 10y ago

> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...

glitchdout 10y ago
It's even worse when it's a sticky header. In those cases when you hit the "Page Down" key the content is covered by the header and you have to press "Up" a few times to read it.

mrwilhelm 10y ago

>>> so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.

stonogo 10y ago
I'm not changing my browsing habits because Medium's engineers suck at sending text.

knight17 10y ago

>> I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates. It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts. Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side. Example: I am on this page (https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.html https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.h...) and I can see all his posts without leaving the current page which I arrived from Google. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5 http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5 [1]: Some have list pages which is great. It only requires one extra click [2]: Not to mention the humongous page sizes [3]: Evernote killed Clearly

elcapitan 10y ago

> In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. I save almost all Medium posts to Instapaper and read them there, for the same reason, and because it makes it much easier to read.

Traubenfuchs 10y ago

They went all out with JavaScript overengineering. On mobile devices I don't want to use it at all.

mercer 10y ago
Is it a speed thing, or mostly a UX thing that bothers you?
- Traubenfuchs 10y ago
  Using an iPhone 5S with the latest iOS I have caught a handful of behaviors that are clearly bugs, everything else is just the rumbling of a grumpy person with lots of personal opinions about web stuff. Some complaints are not even mobile related. - Performance is fine. It's not great, but it's ok. - Sometimes when I open an article/blog post and can start scrolling already it will push be back to the top. The virtual version of getting tripped up in real life. - The bottom bar is uncomfortable. It adds zero value and adds bloat. On my iPhone 5S the SMS icon touches the Open in app button. Don't get me started on the desktop version with two bars. By the way, the useless and annoying black box that (probably lets you highlight text appears above the top bar when both are visible. I can only guess what the buttons in the black box do, they don't have tooltips. - Try zooming in and out. Things start spazzing around with bad performance, text momentarily becomes white/invisible. The bottom bar is zoomed in too, becoming unusable moving around slowly depending on where I have scrolled. I am convinced nobody ever even tried out zooming in and out. A cheer for attention for details! - If you start scrolling down, the top bar containing topic appears, but without its white background. The white background only appears once you stop your scrolling. - Sometimes I "catch" the blurry, lazy loading images. I don't want to see that many seconds after I opened an article. - Confusing navigation: Many articles lead you to other Medium sites with different top menu choices. - The app shoehorning makes me feel like there is a lack of confidence in the web application.