Building for the Tech Community

Medium | 2022

Our 2021 reader research led Medium to prioritize the go-getter persona—the student or professional who uses Medium to grow in their current or future career. We knew that a lot of these users were reading programming and other technical topics specifically, and a deep dive into the data showed that these topics account for 60% of our reads.

The design team decided to dedicate a month to ideating how we might better serve tech readers and writers. While the designers started with some blue-sky thinking, research worked in tandem to bring more texture and understanding to the broader tech community, both on and off of Medium.

Primary Research Questions

• What is a tech employee’s toolkit, and where does Medium fit in?

• How does this community share information, when, and in what format?

• How important are things like credibility, recency, community, etc.?

Learnings

Key takeaways from this journey include:

• Medium is one of many resources for a tech user, often reached via Google. The type of resource depends on the job to be done:

  • I’m learning something new

  • I need help with code

  • I need tips or best practices

  • I want industry and peer updates

• This is a community that loves to share information through a variety of formats—often communal, often not with an original post.

• Community-oriented features like threads and upvotes lend themselves to this type of information sharing.

• Despite expertise and a desire to contribute, writing is still really hard. Even the biggest subject matter expert can be intimidated by the blank page.

• For those that do write, knowledge-sharing and reputation-building are primary motivators. For this cohort, monetization is less important than reach.

• Medium’s code editor is at par with GitHub, Jupyter, and others. Writers have to go through a cumbersome process of embedding so that the code output is legible for readers.

Recommendations

We formatted our recommendations for this project as the following “how might we’s” accompanied by specific product ideas:

• How might we better position Medium as a quality resource for the tech community? This might look like:

  • Explicit quality signals

  • Robust commenting and threaded responses

• How might we foster a sense of community between tech users of Medium? This might look like:

  • Private or subscriber-only spaces

  • Alternate forms of engagement besides an original post (e.g. reblogging, list curation)

• How might we better serve Medium’s tech writers? This might look like:

  • Syntax highlighting and other editor improvements

  • Credibility indicators

  • Forms of monetization that do not require putting content behind the paywall (e.g. tipping)

Product Outcomes

This research informed the following work:

• Tipping, which gives non-member readers and non-partner program writers an alternate way to pay and monetize, respectively (in beta)

• Syntax highlighting within the editor (in flight)

• Explicit signals, both positive and negative, to help users level up quality content (in flight)