New York Times updates its app design to be more personalised
Product & Tech Initiative Blog | 17 June 2024
When I opened my NYTimes app recently, I noticed a few updates: two fairly major ones and a small but delightful design update.
If you look at the bottom navigation of the NYTimes app, you’ll notice it has gone from three options in early 2023 (Home, Sections, For You), adding Games in August 2023, and now settling, for the moment, on five tabs: Home, Listen, Play, Sections, You. Personally, I like the directive language Listen rather than Audio and Play rather than Games.
Let’s look at the new tab on the bottom nav, Listen, as pictured below. The page features a playlist, which is easy for those who want minimal scroll or decision-making, plus some popular podcasts and audio articles. This could be personalised as they seem to have made some good picks for me, but I can’t be sure of this.
Initially, I wondered whether this may be replacing the audio app, but there are very clear calls to action directing people to the stand-alone audio app. See the last two screenshots below, one at the bottom of the Listen page and the other at the end of a narrated article.
So while it could be the beginning of the end for the audio app, I have a strong suspicion they are testing to see if different audiences gravitate towards different products, i.e., does the audio app have a stand-alone audience and therefore warrant a stand-alone subscription?
The other big update is to the You tab, on the bottom right of the app. What was For You is now You, but it’s not just the name — it’s much more personalised. This is very similar to the onboarding outlined in the INMA report Best personalisation practices for news media, where a consumer chooses topics and then refines the selection. This page then populates with the popular “card” format, which allows readers to scroll sections and then swipe to look at recent articles.
Once you have made an initial selection, this can be refined by adding using the “+” in the top right or removing using the “...” at the top right of each card. Those same three dots allow you to rearrange the order of the cards by dragging and dropping, as per the last screenshot below.
Last but not least, as I was browsing the mobile app in early June, I noticed this live image. It struck me as so simple yet elegant and eye-catching. A small detail, but one that works to highlight something special.
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