In October, The New York Times launched a new app which, in their words, “cements our app as the home for unrivaled journalism and the front door to the full New York Times product portfolio.”
In a world where subscriptions come from different places, news is staying at the core.
“In a bid to improve content discovery, the Times is updating the way readers find stories, sections, and products in its app. While users land on the Today feed and can scroll through stories as before, they can now access other verticals or parts of the bundle by swiping horizontally.”
This is what I want to dive into today. What they have done is to create a super app of sorts.
At the top navigation, the user sorts by content types. At the bottom, it’s by format.
Opening the app, a user always lands on Today. This is very much in line with The New York Times’ mission of keeping journalism at the front and center. You can then see how content categories sit either side of this, allowing the user to scroll. To the far right lives a “Sections” tab that takes a user to the full range. To the far left are “Games” and “Audio,” which we dive into below.
This setup leaves the app ripe for personalisation. Imagine if a user could set the most important sections either side of Today? Or, maybe even better, the app does it automatically for you based on behaviour.
The bottom navigation allows a user to choose by format. As we know, The New York Times has made great strides in both their audio and their games. This setup allows users to easily go straight to their preferred format.
The layout of the first screen of both games and audio changes, depending on how the user navigated there. If you go from the top navigation, the layout is more list based for games, and after a bold card, audio follows the same format. However, if navigated to at the lower part, the app is more-card based. I suspect this is based on behaviours, and it will be interesting to see how this develops now that it is in one app.
It could be easy to assume The New York Times is pursuing a one-app strategy. But that may not be the case.
As you can see from the screenshots below, major sections have a push to the relevant app. Or if there is no app — such as Wirecutter — it brings up a browser.
I assume the main app can only hold so much content, and there is a need to send users elsewhere for depth. But this could be part of a multi-app strategy. At the moment, they give users the best of both worlds.
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