Starting a new analysis series of things that I see and bother me.

Disclaimer: there’s no shade to any of the people involved in the design and implementation of these subjects. The world is complicated and we can’t do our best all the time.

Analysis

Today we will analyze Medium’s comment section.

The first image illustrates the start of the page. All good so far.

Scrolling down we found the comment section:

It says there are 22 responses. It allows me to write my own response.

Then there’s a list of responses, what are they sorted by? I see they are not by date. Neither by number of “likes”? So is it defined by their own “recommended” metric? I have no idea.

I want to see more responses. Hence I click the button.

Now it opened a sidebar with more comments. A bit weird to show on the side, but ok. At least it says it’s ordered by Most Relevant.

Also there are 2 scrollbars, one from the page itself and one from the sidebar. Not a big fan.

Some of the comments are clearly truncated, with a “more” button.

Some others are not truncated, but are inside a box:

Some are truncated AND inside a box.

Some are just truncated, but wait a minute, these are user written ellipsis!

A bit confusing. But you can still hover over a response, and if the cursor changes, it means it’s a truncated reply.

So let’s see more of that.

Now we’ve been taken to a completely different page!

Ok, cool, let’s hit the back button and continue seeing the other posts.

Nope. We are back to an “initial state”, the comment section is collapsed and we lost our position.

Anyway, let’s see a different post now. Let’s click “more” on this one:

It just expanded in place, alright.

Let’s click another comment

This one just scrolls to the highlighted section from the original article. Not a very clear distinction except that the box contains a green highlight.

Valid to say that the sidebar comment thing uses infinite scroll to load more comments, it’s well done, but I think it’s something in the way to keep context between navigation. Of course it can be done, but it’s more work.

Also replies can be shown in the same sidebar:

The usual padding way of creating hierarchy. I wonder how many layers they use until migrate to a different solution (probably linking to the “Individual Response” page).

And last but not least, if you click the number of “Claps” in the original post, it opens a modal, which in this case has enough content to require a scrollbar:

But if you click the browser scrollbar, it closes the modal!

So you have to use the mouse wheel/equivalent, which at the end has a “Show more claps” button.

No infinite scroll here huh?

Also, differently from the “Responses” button, which both icon and number correspond to the same action, the “Claps” have 2 different actions depending on where you click: if it’s the icon, it adds a “Clap”, if it’s the number, it shows the modal previously discussed.

Conclusion

I’ve briefly went over the “Response” section of a Medium article. Pointing what I found was OK, what was weird and or/inconsistent.

My personal design preferences are to simplify and keep it consistent. But it’s known the organizations are big and complex and end up lacking a unified view.