Medium Responses
Redesign of Medium's comment and response system. Research-driven approach with competitive analysis of 12+ products and user interviews with 20 readers and writers.
Context
At Medium, responses (our version of comments) were central to how readers and writers engaged with stories. But the old system was fragmented: following discussions meant jumping between pages, losing context, and making it hard to follow or contribute meaningfully.
Our goal was to make responses feel native to the reading experience while encouraging thoughtful, safe, and engaging discussion.
Research
We started by going deep on understanding the problem space:
- Competitive analysis: Evaluated 12+ products across ~50 attributes, including reactions, sorting, nesting, publishing behavior, and community moderation tools.
- User interviews: Spoke with 20 readers and writers, ranging from top commissioned authors to emerging voices.
Key insights:
- Writers felt the existing UX discouraged meaningful engagement.
- Many readers valued responses as highly (or more) than the story itself.
- Both groups wanted easier ways to follow discussion without losing context.
- Safety was a recurring concern: users wanted stronger signals around respectful behavior and moderation.
Prototyping & Interaction Design
To explore new directions quickly, I built a React-based prototype embedded in a Chrome extension. To support new interaction patterns, I also spun up a lightweight proxy API that generated nested responses — something Medium's backend didn't support at the time.
This setup allowed us to swap out Medium's existing response interface directly in the browser without touching production code. Employees across the company adopted the prototype as their default experience.
Concepts we tested:
- Side panel threading: Letting readers see and join responses without leaving the story.
- Discussion module: Reframing the empty text box into a more intentional call-to-action.
- Publishing as a story: Giving users the option to expand a response into a fully publishable story.
- Safety cues: Surface-level reminders of community guidelines before responding.
Outcome
Over ~3 months, we validated a direction that balanced Medium's mission of thoughtful discourse with user needs for context, engagement, and safety.
The design shipped in 2020 and remains largely unchanged today. Early metrics showed a 20% increase in average number of responses per user after rollout.
The most rewarding part was blending deep research with scrappy prototyping. By spinning up a Chrome extension, we created a low-friction way to test real interactions, get rapid user feedback, and de-risk design decisions before committing engineering resources.