Medium “bookmarks” feature — a UX case study

How can we make it easier to use?

Published in

UX Collective

4 min readAug 28, 2018

Recently I’ve been searching more on Medium than on Google (no hard feelings, Google 😉). The high quality content and clean design really help Medium stand out from other blogging platforms.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

The one thing that has bothered me most is the “Bookmarks” feature. It’s just… so hard to use! It feels like a messy closet: You know you have the things you need inside, but you just can’t find it. 🤷‍ After putting up with it for a while, I decided to put on my designer’s hat and gave it a shot.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are my own. Medium has its business goals and metrics that I’m not aware of.)

1. Background

Why do We Use Medium Bookmarks?

Medium “Bookmarks” is a special spot to put the things we want to refer back to. Besides the human nature to loooove collecting things (one big reason why Pokemon Go went viral in 2016! Read more about Psychology of Collecting.) There are a few other scenarios me and my friends experienced:

This story is so great that I want to save it for future reference;
I stumble on this 7 min story with an intriguing title but don’t have the time to read at that moment;
I just want to queue up some stories from feeds to read on my commute home;
Others (Comment to let me know!)

Goals for Bookmarks

Based on the scenarios, there are two main goals people try to achieve with Bookmarks:

Have a clear image of what are collected;
Locate specific content easily and efficiently.

Nah, “Offline reading” doesn’t really cut it.

2. Problems

Let’s measure Bookmarks feature against the above-mentioned goals:

Have a clear image of what are collected?
Failed: No total numbers, no tags, no types… nothing.
Locate specific content easily and efficiently?
Failed: No search function; Infinite scrolling work for certain feeds, but it sucks for this feature.

I appreciate Minimalist style. But it needs to be usable.

“Bookmarks” on desktop might not seem like a big deal, but on mobile it even owns a spot on tab bar! Sadly not very usable either.

Pain Points

No way to tell the total number of bookmarks;
Infinite Scrolling makes navigation difficult;
No search bar, let alone filtering/sorting options;
Stories and Responses are confusingly mixed together.

3. Research

Well, not the comprehensive UX research you were expecting…🤥

I studied websites with Save or Collect feature. Some of them are: Pocket, Instapaper, Pinterest, Youtube, Facebook, etc.

The things they do well:

• Content Grouping

• Search Function (not global search)

• Personalized Collections

4. Proposed Redesign

A few relevant features will boost Bookmarks’ usability. For visual consistency, I used similar pattern of Medium’s current design.

New Features:

1. Summary Line — to show the number of stories and responses bookmarked;
2. Search Bar — just for bookmarks feature;
3. Content Grouping — into stories, responses, collections and tags.
4. Hover Information Card — with bookmarked date, your highlights and your responses (if any).

Prototype

5. Final Thoughts

No design is too small. (Or at least that’s what I told myself when I started this tiny project last weekend.)
If you find something hard to use, go ahead and make it better. Don’t wait for others to make your life easier.
Adding a few features to Bookmarks wouldn’t seem to cause huge technical burdens to Medium. So why don’t they have it in the first place? Anybody?? (I’m glad I didn’t do too much research to cause me analysis paralysis and dropped this case study completely. Whew…)

Thanks for reading! ❤︎ I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Leave a comment or contact me on LinkedIn. ☺