We recently released a new table of contents feature, automatically available on all Medium stories on the web that include headers and subheaders.
Readers come to Medium for all kinds of stories, but some of the most popular stories are those that teach readers something new. A tutorial, a how-to, a guide from someone who’s done it and can take you through it, step by step. And those tend to be on the longer side. About one in ten stories published on Medium is over 2,000 words long, or over a ten-minute read.
The problem was that up until a few weeks ago, most readers didn’t have good ways to navigate those long, chunkier stories easily. Not an issue for more narrative essay-style stories, but if you were reading a guide on, say, “how to visualize time series patterns with ggtime in R programming,” it made sense that you’d want a way to easily scan the structure of that story and navigate exactly to where it made sense for you, especially if you were coming back to the tutorial over a series of days or weeks.
Now, you’ll be able to easily scan and read longer, structured stories on Medium.
