Challenge 1:

Explaining things hard to explain

Through conversations with Creative Commons and internally, we arrived at nine options we wanted to give Medium authors:

One (default) license where the author keeps all the rights.

One license for things already in public domain, now re-published on Medium.

Six Creative Commons licenses where the author reserves some, but not all of the rights.

One Creative Commons license where the author cedes all the rights and effectively puts a new creation in the public domain.

The universe of these nine options would be complicated even if licenses were common knowledge. They’re not. Most people have little idea what terms like “copyright” or “fair use” actually mean, let alone lesser-known concepts such as “share alike” or “copyright waiver.” (To be perfectly honest I struggle, too.)

The UI would combine two aspects, then: the mechanics of choosing the license, and the explanation of the value of licensing in general.

Exploration 1

Let’s start with something simple. We have nine licenses and we could just show all of them as radio buttons:

This has only seven options, actually, but it’s already unbearable. Therefore, we decided to explore grouping the licenses into a two-level hierarchy. This would ameliorate the option paralysis, and also provide a nice conceptual framework: choosing a license is really about deciding which rights you care about, and which you don’t.

Exploration 2

We thought three groups made most sense:

All rights reserved: The one default license.

Some rights reserved: The six Creative Commons licenses.

No rights reserved: Two licenses for old and new public domain works.

The six Creative Commons “some rights reserved” licenses proved to be the most tricky to handle. Since they are expressed as a combination of one or more properties with distinctive, recognizable icons (Attribution, No Derivatives, Share Alike, and Non-Commercial), my first idea was a “license builder,” where you could use checkboxes to put together a license of any flavour. But this has many problems.

First and foremost, four checkboxes allow sixteen different options, but only six of them are actually valid. This means that the UI would have to deal with error states, which seemed awful.

Plus… we don’t use checkboxes on Medium! Which means in addition to designing and implementing the dead ends above, we would have to design and implement checkboxes just for this one dialog.

Lastly, all of those checkboxes look scary and complicated, and there are a lot of words here. (By the way, spot a mock-up typo!)

Explorations 3–5

After some deliberation, we decided to express the six licenses as a secondary list. The UI went into some dark places before emerging (somewhat) cleaner and nicer.