How would you improve medium?

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How would you improve medium?

Asked at Google over a year ago

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sowjanya yaddanapudi · Answer 1 · 2021-11-12T01:29:38+0000

Medium is a knowledge sharing platform which connects the authors to the audience. Users can view the articles published by the authors. They can also comment, clap and follow the author so as to be notified when the authors have a new story published.

Let’s assume we would like to improve the user experience as it would lead to engagement and the time spent on the app. When we mean spend time, we would like to ensure the feature improvements are helping quality time engaged with the app.

Goal: Improve the medium experience which helps users spend more time on the app.

Users:

Authors – People who publish the stories

Viewers – Viewers of the articles

Painpoints

Pain point	Priority
Messaging between the members	P1
Doc recommendations in the publisher page	P1
Pagination
Number of views on a given article isn’t available	P2
Medium doesn’t surface the Volumes / series of stories by an author. - like “more from this author”	P2

Solutions

Solution	Impact	Effort	Pros & Cons
ML Algorithm which suggests related articles	High	Medium	Need enough sample data to be able to build a algorithm Very rewarding because the user feels engaged and continues to spend time on the app
Trending articles based on views / read time based on the original article	High	Medium	Needs enough sample data and since its ML model accuracy will be based on the maturity of the model and implicit and explicit feedback Very rewarding because the user feels engaged and continues to spend time on the app
Most shared-on media articles	Low	Medium	The con of this feature is that sharing could be very biased to promote the article.

I would go ahead and implement the top two solutions on the righthand side real estate of the medium article published, I see its pretty empty and a good place to suggest recommended articles

Metrics :

Click Thru rates -> No. of click thru rates on the suggested recommendations

Successful CTR sessions : Time spent by the user post clicking on the recommendations

Bounce rate: no. of bounce rates back to the article page