Doing Your Job For You: Redesigning the Medium Stats Page

Work is hard.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just earn a paycheck without actually having to expend any effort? What if someone were to, say, do your job for you while you played League of Legends, or made stupid selfie videos with flower wreath filters on Snapchat?

What if they were to do your job better than you could?

That’s what my new series is all about. With Bad UX Roundup, I call out examples of design so bad that the solution is obvious. Just identifying the problem gets you 90% of the way to a better design. Sometimes, though, the problem is the absence of good design rather than the presence of something actively crappy. Simply saying “hey, this sucks” won’t help someone if they couldn’t come up with a good design in the first place. I guess I’ll have to be the change I want to see in the world.

And with that, let’s get to our first DYJ4U. Appropriately enough, the pilot episode of this series will be about Medium. There have been a couple attempts at “redesigning” Medium’s Stats page on Dribbble et. al. but they are mostly graphical masturbation rather than an actual functional improvement. So what better place to start?

There’s something Medium.com is not telling you.

Actually, there are a lot of things Medium is not telling you. Medium’s Stats page is missing all sorts of information that the platform does track, information that could be used by Medium authors to improve their content and grow their audience, both of which would benefit Medium immensely. Aside from better content and reader engagement, Medium needs better stats simply so the most valuable authors don’t get fed up with the lack of data and just start posting to their own website.

Just how bad is Medium’s Stats page? Let’s have a look. Here is a recent version.

Now, let me show you all the things that are wrong with it.

You can only view 30 days of metrics at a time.

This one has me scratching my head.

Let’s say I want to see how my articles have performed over the course of the year. I’m shit out of luck. Stats only shows you your performance in 30 day chunks. Maybe I can just quickly hit the “Prev 30 days” button and watch as the lines go up or down, right? Nope. The scale on that bar graph is calibrated to each 30 day period, not your all-time performance, so it changes every time you switch periods. For a period in which the peak daily number of views was 100, the longest bar on the graph will look the same as in a period when the peak number was 20.

Pretty stupid huh?

I don’t know why they do it this way. Google Analytics already has a perfectly functional design for time period zooming and panning that Medium could have copied. Maybe they just wanted to be different.

You cannot filter your comments from your metrics.

Every now and then I’ll leave some offhand remark on another article, and that article will get a ton of traffic. As a result, so too will my comment. Sometimes, the comment will get way more views than any of my actual articles I have written, which will really screw up the bar chart when I am looking at my content views over time.

On the Stats page, there is this tab selector:

You can be forgiven if you were to assume that clicking on “Stories” vs “Responses” filters your performance graph for only your actual articles vs. comments you leave because that’s what any sane designer would design. No. That’s not how it works. Clicking on those tabs simply changes the list of individual articles, comments, and series without filtering the graph at all. To add insult to injury, Medium actually reloads the page when you click these tabs, causing the graph to refresh, making you think the graph has been filtered. It hasn’t.

Why would I ever want a bunch of my own stupid comments factored into my metrics? Why wouldn’t you give me an option to filter them out so I can focus on the articles. People follow me for the articles. Kind of like Playboy.

Where are the clap statistics?

Medium seemed very proud of their silly new “clap” system when they launched it. I remain dubious about it if for no other reason than it seems twee. But if you’re going to do something, do it right.

On the Stats page, Medium only shows you the number of people who have clapped at least once for your article, and not the total number of claps the article received. For that, you actually have to go to the article itself. This is a pretty major omission and yet a very easily solved design problem.

While we’re at it, what about follow statistics?

Medium will sometimes send me an email saying that people followed me directly from one of my articles. They don’t ever store that information for me to return to later though. Just as I cannot see how many claps an article received, I cannot see how many fans were gained directly from an article.

There are no grand totals.

If I want to know the total number of views or reads I have had on my content, I have to manually add up all the 30 day periods. Even in the absence of a zoomed-out view, one would think Medium would see fit to include grand totals for the most important stats.

Interestingly, if you run a publication, you can see the total number of minutes people have spent on your publication for the last 30 or 90 days. But again, no all-time total. And that feature is not available for your personal posts.

It is hard to compare all your articles if you have a large number.

Some people write Medium articles every day. Some people write several times a week. If you do that long enough, you’ll accumulate a large pile of articles. You might want to compare the individual articles against each other to see which has the best read ratio, or if your ratio has gotten better over time. You might want to see which articles get the most enthusiastic responses (more claps per clapper). Well, too bad. You can’t. Unless you want to go and manually enter the data into an Excel sheet, you’re SOL.

Given that Medium is supposedly planning to make claps part of their writer payment system, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they would want to allow writers to optimize their performance? Apparently not.

Your total number of followers and follows are not shown on the Stats page at all.

If you want to know how many people are following you, you have to go to your profile page. This is an annoying extra step and for no good reason other than lazy designers.

Publication dates are not visible on the Stats page.

Each of your articles is listed like this:

Notice how you cannot see when it was published? You have to actually click on the “View story” link and go to the article itself. Another annoying extra step that you have to take all because the designers couldn’t figure out how to fit a small piece of information into perfectly adequate space.

You cannot track referrers over time.

Stats gives you the ability to see where your traffic is coming from. It is a helpful feature, but it would be way more helpful if it were not so tragically half-assed. Unless I want to look at every article every day or set up some sort of a script, there’s no way for me to know when a spike in traffic came from a certain source.

Referrers is also confusing as hell.

If your list of Referrers did not include “Medium emails and notifications”, would you ever guess that “email, IM, and direct” did not include e-mails from Medium? Probably not.

What does “android-app://com.google.android.gm” mean, anyway?

And did you know that if you click on the title of the referrer, it will take you there? … wherever “there” is. If I click on “google.com”, it will take me exactly where it says it will. If I click on “android-app:”, it will also take me exactly where it says it will, which is nowhere, because that’s not a URL.

If you didn’t know that, then you definitely didn’t know that clicking “facebook.com” or “twitter.com” will actually take you to a special query on either site that looks for links to your Medium article so you can see who is talking about your content. It doesn’t work with LinkedIn, though. You would never know because they don’t tell you or even give you a hint. You just need to stumble onto it by accident.

Their sorry excuse for a Help page doesn’t actually help. The only thing it tells you about Referrers is what you could have figured out by clicking on “Referrers”. Fucking genius.

There’s still no back button on the Referrers page.

I already covered this in a previous article. It would take literally 5 minutes to add this feature. Interns… I swear.

Redesigning Medium Stats

Now for the moment you’ve been waiting for. I’ve addressed all the problems I just listed above in my redesigned Medium Stats page. Let’s look at the before and after.

BEFORE

AFTER

So, what’s different? Let’s go through it from top to bottom.

Your follower/following stats are right up at the top.

No more clicking to another page to see this basic information. Simple.

Now you can view by content and tag as well as over time.

This is a major improvement. In the old design, all you could do was track your performance over time but not between different articles. Now you can compare articles and comments by clicking “By content” and even the different tags you have applied to your content.

You can actually filter the data.

No more having to sort out your actual articles from your stupid offhand remarks. By clicking the “All content” dropdown, you can switch to “Stories”, “Responses”, and “Series”. If you were to click a specific article on the list below, that dropdown would read the name of the article you are looking at.

You can also sort by referrers in a similar way. The dropdown will contain every source that has referred to at least one of your articles.

Maybe most importantly, you can select the time period the graph covers. You can view from the very first article you posted to the present day in a single graph to track how far you’ve come. The list of content at the bottom would automatically be filtered along with the graph too.

You can track the claps and new follows you get on a daily basis.

I added a tab for each of those variables above the graph, as well as columns in the list below.

There is a quick link to expand the scope of the graph.

For those too lazy to go to the dropdown menu and pick a specific timeframe, you can click on “See 60 days” to show a 60 day window instead of 30 days. From there you could expand it to 90 or go back to 30, and so on.

The font size for the articles is smaller.

It used to be ginormous. Now you can see more articles on screen at once.

Clicking on the article title actually takes you to the article.

The fact that Medium actually posts this at the top of your stats page is a tacit admission of their own design failure:

The reason they have to say that is because most people would assume clicking the title of the article would actually take you to the article. Now it does.

“But what if you actually want to filter by the article?” I hear you saying. Good question. Instead, I propose that…

Clicking on those sparkbars filters to the article.

The sparkbar is a preview of what will show up on the main graph when you click it. The sparkbar reflects whatever variable is being shown on the main graph and will therefore change when you select a different tab.

Dates are visible.

No more clicking “View story” to see the date.

And just for good measure, let’s throw in a graph that follows you.

If you have a long list of articles, you won’t be able to see the graph as you scroll down through them. This version decreases the vertical real-estate of the graph to show more articles on screen.

Redesigning the Referrers page

As I already discussed, the Referrers page also is full of omissions. Well, as a bonus for Medium, I threw in a redesign of that page too.

There is now a back button.

How embarrassing is it that you need to be told that one of your pages has no way out except through your browser’s controls?

There is comprehensive filtering.

All the same drilldown and filtering tools available when viewing the articles are now available to those browsing referrers. This is another no-brainer.

You can see a history of referrals from each source.

Under the current design, unless you are watching your referrals like a hawk, you won’t be able to know when a specific source discovered your article. I fixed that.

Related sources get grouped.

Medium differentiates between referrals from the Medium homepage, the Android app, the iOS app, or your own profile, or other Medium articles. What if I want to track the traffic I’m getting from Medium in general? I added that in too (as well as the obvious “Ungroup” option).

Sources are explained.

Any source that appears frequently enough on the site will be explained by Medium so you know what it means.

Sources that let you query for your links are marked.

No more guessing which sources do this and which ones don’t.

And there you have it

It took me longer to write this article than it did to design the fixes to the glaring deficiencies in Medium’s Stats page. This wasn’t a particularly hard problem to solve. It will be interesting to see if they actually implement these designs now that I’ve done the “hard” work for them.

That’s all the free help you’re getting, Medium. That doesn’t mean the work is done. There is still the matter of the atrocious iOS app where the Stats are even more slipshod than the desktop website. And then we have the mobile website which manages to suck ever still more exuberantly. If you want me to fix those, you know how to reach me.

Want more of me?

After you’re done getting your head checked, you can find me at these places.

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jclauss/

More articles like this:
http://blackmonolith.co/publications

I’m the guy you just can’t teach, and I always kick the castle that’s been built up on the beach.