THE NEW YORK TIMES
Designing a mobile-first news app
This app started as a 100% day project at the New York Times (inspired by Google’s 20% time) that overlapped with the company’s goals to attract a younger audience of news consumers. Myself and a small team set out to build a lightweight, mobile first news app, and also figure out how to build new products at The Times.
Role: UX Research, Interaction Design, Product Strategy (IC) Team: Editor, Engineer, Product Manager
THE CHALLENGE
The New York Times wanted to reach a new younger audience of news readers while experimenting with new ways to build product.
Goals
• Capture a new younger audience of news consumers, willing to pay a lower subscription.
• Experiment on new forms of content created specifically for mobile.
• Understand the mechanisms that made news consumption “mobile-first” to inform how content was created.
MOBILE FIRST NEWS
Existing paradigms on smaller screens.
We wanted to change the way the news was created, delivered and consumed to be designed for a mobile, always updated consumer in 2014.
The current way we thought about news on mobile was very much downstream of a traditional newspaper. News was created, produced and distributed with these very specific systems in place, and the apps simply consumed it.
We aimed to rethink what content creation and distribution would look like on a phone.
USER RESEARCH
What would actually make this new and better?
Since “lightweight” and “mobile-first” did not capture what user problem this new app would be solving, we started with UX Research to better understand the value prop. By prompting users with sketches of ads, we were able to have a conversation about why they were drawn to each concept. This helped inform the product strategy and marketing messages, and also our first steps.
User problems
• Overwhelmed with information, want the need-to-know news to be able to have conversations with people
• Feel like they are only learning about the news they care about on social media, and missing out on a more holistic view
• No time to read long articles
News moments
We took time to think about how people consume the news, and what moments we were really designing around. This helped the team empathize with our target users, and helped the editors writing the content change their mental model of news consumption.
The core NYTimes app consumed content downstream of the paper. NYTNow was the first digital news product at the Times to move away from that.
THE RESULT
Introducing NYTNow v1.0
NYT Now started as an idea at the company’s 100% day, and ended up kicking off a new way of developing at The Times.
After many iterations, the team landed on an app that packaged need-to-know news in simple feed, featuring Times original content and curated stories from other sources. Articles were original NYTimes, but all other content in the app was customized for the NYT Now experience.
We worked with a fully staffed editorial team that created The Daily Briefing, bullet point overviews of stories, and commentary on every curated story they selected.
Curated stories from NYT and other sources
Daily briefings
Developing stories with news alerts
IMPACT
Users loved it, but it didn’t hit the business goals
We learned so much. There are many ways to make the news more approachable without loosing the integrity of a brand like The New York Times. Simple elements like tone and framing of content can radically alter people’s emotional attachment to a product (opening with “good morning” was one of the most loved features).
This app became a sandbox for low-risk experimentation, things we learned were incorporated into the core New York Times apps. 200K+ users loved the product and we dropped the average age of Times news consumers by 20+ years. The product was ultimately sunset because it didn’t meet revenue targets. However, it paved the way for other vertical products to be developed at The Times.
We were lucky to get recognized by Fast Company, get named on of Apple’s “Best New Apps” and be loved by our users.