“We have a large portfolio of products, and we’ve brought all of them into the app – especially games. What we see is a beautiful, symbiotic relationship with news,” said Emily Withrow, VP of Product and Head of Subscriber Experiences, The New York Times, said,

When The Times added games to the news app, it measured how that affected news consumption. What it found was that if people came for games, they stayed for the news – and if they came for news, they returned for games.

This feedback helped the publisher make the app a one-stop destination for news, games, audio and more.

These findings were shared during by Withrow and NYT’s VP of Product Design, Kristen Dudish, during WAN-IFRA’s recent Congress in Krakow.

The 5 principles guiding everything NYT designs

The product team at The New York Times follows five user-experience design tenets:

• Clarity
• Trust
• High standards of craft
• Accessibility, and
• Time well spent.

These principles guide everything they design.

For the recent redesign, the focus was mainly on clarity – making it easier for users to understand how the journalism is structured, how the business works, and what their subscription includes.

A new navigation that reflects the brand

At the heart of the redesign is a new ribbon navigation at the top of the screen. Rather than sticking to traditional sections, The Times focused on showcasing the breadth of its journalism.

“We wanted something elegant and seamless, but also something that showcased the full scope of our journalism,” said Kristen Dudish.

This meant breaking away from old categories such as “World” or “Metro” in favour of more curated sections.

The ribbon navigation goes left and right. Swipe right and you’re seeing The New York Times signature journalism. Swipe left and you’re greeted with its product portfolio – The Athletic, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter.

The redesign also introduced a new bottom navigation centred on user modes, starting with a dedicated “Play” tab to access games.

“The ‘Home’ tab is about discovering the breadth of our journalism. ‘Listen’ is for audio. ‘You’ is the place that personalises to you based on the interaction with the app,” Dudish said.

To separate daily news from other content, the design team gave lifestyle stories their own look and feel. The first swipe from the Today feed, which is text-heavy and focused on the urgency and timeliness of the news, takes users to the Lifestyle section.

“The culture and lifestyle content lend themselves to a more visual treatment. There’s beautiful photography, and we wanted to highlight that. It’s also a space we’re continuing to experiment with,” Dudish said.

The team is also planning on adding looping video.

A redesign that learns from ‘You’

The team scraped the older “For You” tab for the new “You” tab in the revamp. The redesign puts emphasis on both user behaviour and editorial curation.

“It wasn’t clear to users why things were appearing there [in the For You section],” Dudish said. “It was a mix of editorial programming and some algorithmic stuff. It just wasn’t quite there.”

However, the new You tab learns over time, surfacing content a user reads repeatedly. The first version of You was launched in 2024.

For instance, when a user reads a column more than three or five times, it gets added automatically to their personal space or the You tab.

“What we kept hearing from users was that they wanted personalisation – not in the form of a filter bubble or a generic algorithmic feed, but access to the parts of The Times they know and love. That’s exactly what the You tab is built to provide,” Withrow said.

‘Engaged clicks’ matter more than just clicks

At The New York Times, an “engaged click” means a user spends at least 30 seconds with a piece of content.

Whether it’s an article, video, or audio story, if a user stays for half a minute, it counts, Withrow said.

The Times also works closely with its advertising team. While none of the panels in the app currently include ads, articles do.

The design of these ads is carefully considered to avoid being disruptive.

Whenever new ad formats are introduced, the NYT team tracks the bounce rates, engagement, and performance to ensure alignment with user expectations.

Clicks by themselves aren’t enough.

“When we look at articles, we look at engaged clicks, not just clicks,” Withrow said. “Measuring only clicks can lead to clickbait-type behaviour, and we really want to make sure what we’re providing is valuable.”

Aim for app is to ‘drive discoverability’

With the redesign, The New York Times has taken two strategic paths. One is showcasing the breadth of their journalism – expanding the canvas for storytelling. The other is the bundle subscription, making The Times app the front door to all their products.

“Our goal is not to create a ‘super app.’ What we really want is for the news app to drive discoverability of our other products and act as a launchpad,” Dudish said.

Unlike most redesigns, which cause a temporary dip in user engagement, The New York Times didn’t see that this time.

“We maintained the baseline, which we were really excited about,” Withrow said, adding, “Actually, no change is great. And from there, we’ve just been building.”

She also pointed to the broader shift happening across digital media. With the decline of search and social, one-to-one relationships with our subscribers are paramount, she said.

Users who download the app engage more deeply across the board, Withrow added.

“You visit more, you read more, you spend more time with us. It’s just the best place to consume the journalism,” she said.