Transforming The New York Times: Empowering Evolution through UX

Libby Gery, Kristen Dudish at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/N5H7XyHlYIU

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why clarity is our focus

[00:00:00] Kristen: Hello, hello, good morning. We are very excited to be here today. My name is Kristen Dudish and I am a VP of product design at the New York Times, where I lead teams that are focused on our subscriber experiences.

[00:00:14] Libby: And I'm Libby Gery. I'm also a VP of product design at the Times. I work on teams focused on our storytelling formats and our publishing tools. And we're very excited to talk to you all today about how we use design exploration to drive clarity in the user experience, and a couple of different ways that we do that.

[00:00:37] Libby: Before we dive in, it's important to understand why clarity is our focus, and it really starts with our company mission. So at the New York Times we seek the truth and help people understand the world. And this mission is rooted in the belief that great journalism has the power to make each reader's life richer and more fulfilling, and to make society as a whole stronger and more just. And to drive that mission forward, our journalism is represented by a broad portfolio of products. So we of course have news, which everyone is aware of, but we also have games, cooking, audio, Wirecutter and The Athletic. So really quick, a show of hands, who here subscribes to at least one of those products? Ah, amazing, so many. Okay, that's awesome, and thank you.

[00:01:37] Libby: So our vision for our product portfolio and for our business is to become the essential subscription for every curious English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world. So the continued creation and delivery of our journalism is the central part of our company strategy and always will be, but we strongly believe that a fine-tuned product experience will enable the Times to play an even bigger role in people's daily lives, and design has a really unique role to play in how we accomplish that.

[00:02:16] Libby: And derived from our company strategy is our UX tenets. So our product design team has developed a set of five UX tenets that we use to evaluate all of our product experiences. There's clarity, optimized for time well spent, uncommonly high standards of craft, accessible to the curious, and trust is paramount. And while each of these is incredibly important to how we create and craft our design, clarity is the first, and it's for good reason. The world is complex, we all know that, and our products are meant to help users parse that complexity by creating distinctions: what's new, what's different, what's worth my time. The design of our products creates clarity by enabling these distinctions and creating an experience that is both easy and enjoyable to use.

[00:03:16] Kristen: Great. So in order to help our users understand the world around them, we need to prioritize the same focus and intent in delivering clarity in the user experience as we do for the journalism. As designers, our unique role is to consider not just the needs of our users and our business, but also the ambition of our newsroom as well. So while we'll always take all three of these needs into account when designing, the balance of what we're looking at is rarely equal. We will find ourselves leaning in one direction or the other depending on what's driving the project, and the direction we lean in drastically changes the way that we work, the speed that we ship, the type of artifacts we create, and ultimately the scale of impact that we will have. So we're going to take you through three different approaches to how we use design exploration to address these needs.

Approach one: advancing product features

[00:04:18] Kristen: So our first approach is when we're advancing product features to meet new user or business needs. This is textbook product development and iteration, and it's likely where product teams are the most comfortable, and where many of you in this room probably spend a lot of your time. There's a clear business strategy that guides us, there is research that points us towards a set of unmet user needs, and we're focused on creating new experiences that seamlessly combine the two of those. And at the Times, while we're always considering how product features appear adjacent and related to our journalism, the news needs in this approach are really supplemental and not the driving force.

[00:05:02] Kristen: So an example of this is when we added games to our news app. With the success of Wordle, which brings in tens of millions of new players each week, it created a business opportunity for us to bring those new people in and introduce them to other Times products, and get them in our ecosystem and in part of our news experience. So we also knew that many of the people were already coming to us in our news product for games, but we weren't doing a great job of showcasing them in a way that was easy to discover, and we also hadn't created an experience within our news product that allowed for gameplay within that product. So our hypothesis was, what if we created a dedicated, easy to find destination within our news product that allowed for us to create a habit through gameplay? So simple, right?

[00:06:01] Kristen: Well, this was our first big step toward our product vision. We were bringing one of our individual products into the news app in a really prominent way, so we had to figure out the best way to do that, and we had some really big questions that we needed to answer before we could come up with a great solution. The first question was, how much of the New York Times games product experience should we actually bring into the news experience? What would be satisfying enough for users to come back on a daily basis, but not completely take over the entire games product experience? So after a lot of collaboration and thinking through that, we ultimately decided that the best approach to start would be to allow users to play each game daily in our news product, but then reserve things like archives and leaderboards for the New York Times games experience and the New York Times games app.

[00:07:00] Kristen: And the second big question we needed to answer was, what's the best way to bring these two very visually distinct products together in a way that felt cohesive and intentional? The New York Times games branding is very colorful and bright, playful, illustrative, as you can see here, and the news product is historically very black and white, it's text driven, it's photographic. So how do we bring those two together in a way where something that's colorful and playful doesn't feel strange and awkward next to some very heavy news stories, which is always a challenge that we have at the New York Times? So our product design team partnered really closely with our brand identity team to do a lot of great explorations about finding what we felt was just the right balance. And you can see a couple of the examples of how we've explored some of that here.

[00:07:54] Kristen: So after we worked through all those key questions, we felt pretty confident in the approach, and we launched an experiment to a small portion of our audience. And that experiment was a Play tab that we added to our primary app navigation, as you can see here. And ultimately it was a success. Once we made a few modifications, we ended up being able to scale that to our full audience, and we were really, really excited about it. People came back daily, they were playing, they loved it. And with all the data that we had from the experiment, and some additional user research that guided us towards a future state, we're continuing to iterate on that experience to this day.

Approach two: working at the speed of news

[00:08:38] Kristen: So that's approach number one. The second approach is really what makes the New York Times unique from a lot of standard tech orgs, and that's when we're advancing our journalistic expression to meet editorial needs. So this is where we say that we work at the speed of news. So here there are highly specific editorial needs that we need to meet, and that allows us to be our most expressive and our most urgent and accurate in response to new scenarios that are unfolding. And we work within existing news user needs when we're working in this model, and it's because we know a lot about what users expect in this space.

[00:09:15] Kristen: We know that UX expectations are going to continue to change, and that's primarily based on how things like social platforms and other ways of consuming the news continue to evolve. We know that we need to consider things like news fatigue, so we need to be considering ways to drive people away from the hard news and into the other breadth of our coverage and other product areas that go beyond that. And then when it comes to our classic news scenarios, there's a set of consistent things that always come up that we know that we need to solve for users. Essentially, they always want to get caught up, they always want to feel prepared, and they always want to gain knowledge and perspective.

The homepage in March 2020

[00:10:01] Kristen: So as an example, the top of our New York Times homepage is where we see this process happen pretty much continuously, because it's the space where users are always coming to us to quickly understand the most important story of the day. We have a fairly templatized and flexible system built for our homepage. It accommodates a lot of different topical news scenarios and supports a lot of the breadth of our coverage. It does things like support various visual emphasis, and includes things like custom graphics and interactives that are produced by our news team.

[00:10:41] Kristen: Sorry about that, go back. On any typical day you can see that there's this two column layout. So on the left we have our top news stories of the day. You can see that that packaging goes down, it talks about the most urgent news stories. And then in the right column is where we show the breadth of our coverage, so those are things like feature stories, opinion, in case you missed it. And that's generally how the page looks on most days.

[00:11:13] Kristen: However, when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, we very quickly realized that the system was not built to expand in scale to support a news story of that caliber. This is what the page looked like in those early days. So at that time we did have the ability and capability to span across the two column layout for really big, urgent news stories, and this is what we call Spotlight. So you'll see this huge package that spans across the top. But it was still fairly rigid, we were still limited to this two column layout. We weren't able to change the number of stories that went into it, we weren't able to add different types of media that the newsroom wanted to support, and we just weren't able to really adapt quickly to the ever evolving and ever expanding coronavirus coverage. So basically I'm just showing you here a bit of how the page was structured at the time, and you'll see that's where that two column layout comes into play.

[00:12:32] Kristen: So at the time, design partnered really, really closely with the newsroom, and we had to quickly adapt that existing layout. We basically were like, what are the most urgent needs we need to do right now to support how the newsroom needs to cover this really complex and ever evolving topic? We knew we needed to support numerous types of content that the newsroom was producing that helped users understand the broader context of this very complex story that was ever changing. We had to do things like include photo galleries, include new interactives and graphics, and we had to include live video. We also had to expand the capabilities to support a lot more stories in one space.

[00:13:16] Kristen: And really, as you can see here at the bottom, that was including things like our service journalism, which was something that we were spinning up on a regular basis in order to answer questions for users on how do I live my life during this kind of crazy time. So we moved to this horizontal layout that allowed us to basically expand and contract the amount of coverage to accommodate all of those news needs. And it really, really changed how the newsroom was able to react on a day-to-day basis and respond to anything that was happening.

[00:13:53] Kristen: So at the time when we started this work, we had no idea how impactful it would be over the course of the year. For context, in 2019 the homepage went into this Spotlight layout a total of 18 times the entire year. However, in 2020 the page was in the Spotlight layout for 122 days in a row. So, immediately, impact. And to this day, that quick response to just one unmet editorial need set us up for a much more flexible system that continued in 2020 and continues to this day to support some of our largest news stories.

Comparing the two approaches

[00:14:42] Kristen: So taking a step back, I want to compare those two approaches that we just talked about, and also talk a little bit about how design achieves clarity within each of them. So when we're advancing our product features to meet new user or business needs, the games example, designers there are facilitating cross-functional alignment, they're creating divergent design explorations and then converging around a set of strong approaches that they can use for experimentation. And because designers are working within that safety net of experimentation, they're able to take some more risks and be able to compare those things against known patterns with confidence. And because designers have adequate time and space for learning and iteration and evolution, they're able to make sure that that clarity is in place before we scale to a broad audience.

[00:15:34] Kristen: In contrast, when we're advancing our editorial toolkit and expression, the Spotlight example, designers are more reactive. They're really meeting the moment in close collaboration with the newsroom, and they're having to make decisions really, really quickly in that process. And the designers need to be mindful of things like workflow and tooling. They have to work within existing capabilities, which might limit design exploration or make changes feel a little bit more incremental in the UX, even if it's drastically changing the editorial. And because UX is quick to scale to a very broad audience, the lens of clarity is critical throughout the process, early on, and really helps us when we're making quick decisions. And these two approaches represent a majority of where we spend our time at the New York Times.

Approach three: a design-led envisioning process

[00:16:30] Libby: But there are moments that are a little different, when designers really take the lead and put user experience at the center of our strategy. So the third scenario we want to describe for you today is a news envisioning process that is currently underway. Actually, yes, there we go. So designers are often the first to see what we're calling a tipping point in the UX that requires a moment of stepping back, evaluating, and applying some creativity to basically come up with an ambitious yet realistic path that the teams can really rally around and build.

[00:17:20] Libby: So today, for example, the designers at the Times are noticing several big shifts playing out. The first big shift is the shape and pace of storytelling, it has been changing. Here are a few recent examples up here of some of our best and most important storytelling, and how it's being presented more recently. In the center there you'll see what we call a vertical card story. It leverages the reporter's voice and first-person video footage to help connect readers in a more visceral way, in this case to an important piece of policy change. Over the past several years designers have helped create a set of diverse storytelling formats like these. Each of them is designed to be more accessible to readers, and also allow the newsroom to be more expressive in how they're presenting the journalism.

[00:18:19] Libby: Here's another example of a format called reporter threads. You can think of this as sort of a lightweight mechanism for a reporter to communicate real-time updates as a story unfolds, or in this case it could be analysis or commentary surrounding an important storyline. A format like this enables a reader to move quickly through and feel caught up and learn something new at the end of it. So these are just a few of the formats that we've developed over the past couple of years, and we know that our newsroom has a strong appetite for more innovation like this and more expressiveness, which leads designers to consider, what does a high-quality news platform look like in a world where there's an increasing amount of visual, immersive and video-driven formats like these?

Shifts in mode and goals

[00:19:12] Libby: Another big shift playing out for us is our reader appetite for consuming journalism in multiple ways. If you're driving or cooking or multitasking, listening to our journalism actually might be the best way to get it. For understanding deeply, the written article is still pretty established. And watching our videos and visuals, as we just talked about, gives you a more visceral feel. Here's one example of a recent story that featured multiple forms of video, obviously a text narrative, and an option to listen to the reporter actually read you a narrated version of the story. And this story isn't unique, we're doing more and more of these today, and we expect this to continue to expand, especially the audio portion. So looking into the future, designers are considering how we might intelligently present multiple modes of journalism in a way that feels like a core product affordance.

[00:20:17] Libby: Finally, for a third major shift that designers have been noticing, I'll bring you back to our original product, the print paper. Here's a view of a spread from this weekend in May from the year 2000, randomly chosen. And one thing that stands out here, and you can see right away, is how the goals informing the design of this product are actually pretty straightforward. We'd like you to read the story, and we'd like you to view ads. You can see, read the story in the center and two full page ads on either side. Pretty straightforward.

[00:20:57] Libby: Whereas today's digital product actually needs to meet reader and business needs in a variety of ways. We would like readers to read the story, yes, view ads, yes, but also we'd like you to explore stories that are part of a broader storyline and get that context and depth of understanding. We'd like you to share the story with people you think might love it. We'd like you to sign up for a related newsletter to make it easier to stay informed. We'd like you to explore the rest of the New York Times through our navigation. And of course, if you're not already, we'd like you to subscribe to the Times for the best experience. Which is a lot of different things we're trying to do, and this is a mobile web story page here.

[00:21:42] Libby: So again, designers are asking, with so many worthy product goals, how might we continue to actually keep user needs at the center of what we're designing for? And that's what really leads us to a design-led envisioning process that we're currently running. Designers notice these major shifts, just to recap here. The format has really been changing. It used to be mostly text, now it's actually more and more multimedia, and that's just going to continue. The mode was reading, now it's reading but also watching, listening and interacting. And as we talked about, the goals had been pretty straightforward, and now we do have many, many goals to sort of integrate and design for.

[00:22:27] Libby: So we have a design team currently engaged with newsroom partners to create a set of future-facing visual prototypes that really intentionally address these changes in our UX. What we want to do through these prototypes is visualize a potential UX that's about one to two years out, and the goal of that artifact would be to align all of our teams and leaders around the thing that we actually want to build over the course of that time frame.

[00:22:59] Libby: So to recap, how are designers leading the way to drive clarity through this envisioning process? First, we're the first to notice that these shifts in journalistic format and consumer expectations are changing, and have been changing, and will continue to do so. And we identify a time frame with our partners for envisioning that's far enough out that it's not going to be constrained by today's workflow and technology, but not so far out that it's beyond the current company strategy that we're working within. And then third, designers use visual prototyping to develop a vision for a future UX that accounts for the business goals, the newsroom ambition, and ultimately drives clarity within a product for our readers.

What hasn't changed

[00:23:49] Libby: So within each of these approaches, and across all of the shifts that we're seeing, what's great for designers at the New York Times is what hasn't changed, and what ultimately won't change, which is our mission to help people understand the world. So whether we're designing at the pace of news to solve for editorial expression, or whether we're designing to make our product offering more delightful and accessible and as a result improve meeting our business goals, or whether we're imagining a long-term vision for our product, UX designers at the New York Times are committed to creating clarity within our experience for our readers. And it's not just because we're product designers and that's what we like to do, but it's because it's a way for them to meaningfully contribute to our company mission on a daily basis. So, that's it. Kristen and I want to thank you for listening in today, we appreciate it. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:25:00] Host: Thank you, ladies, that was incredible. All right, let's see, I'm going to pick and choose this time, I'm going to be in charge of the questions. All right, okay. Working within a news space can be pretty heavy these days. How do you keep it from weighing you down or dimming your creative spark? Who would like to take that question?

[00:25:32] Libby: I'll start. I think it's a real issue for our teams. We've had times over the past several years, Kristen talked about the pandemic, there've been so many examples, it really brings people down. As managers and leaders, I think we've had to be really sensitive to that, because you don't exactly know how a particular news story is going to affect any individual. And these teams are working really closely with the editorial content, they're working in Times stories as they develop to help change the way they're presented, and so there's no real escape when you're in that mode. And so there's not that much we can do other than just remind people that it's okay to feel this way, it's normal, please take breaks, please ask partners to step in for you if you can, and just sort of take a step back.

[00:26:29] Kristen: Yeah, I mean, Libby covered most of it. And one of the things that culturally we try to do as well is create an environment that is really great to work in on a day-to-day basis, and be a really supportive group of people. And that's one of the things that I love most about the Times, is that we have a really great product design culture, a really great group of people that are really supportive and wonderful to work with. And within the subscriber experiences mission that I work within, we also have this motto where we say we take the work seriously but not ourselves, and we just try to bring a light-hearted culture about how we work and how we work with each other, which also kind of helps sometimes in those moments that feel a little bit heavier.

[00:27:07] Host: That's awesome, very empathetic for sure, and understanding. How does your team stay aligned with the visual identity of the print version?

[00:27:19] Kristen: Thoughts. So we have, admittedly, we work at very different paces. The print version is going out on a day-to-day basis, so they're working at a slightly different pace. However, as a broad brand identity across all of our product experiences, we have a brand identity team that really is that connection point, and they are a group of designers that work across both print and digital and act as that sort of connective tissue, and partner with all of the teams. So we really lean on them to be the voice of what typeface do we use, and how do we use something, and what kind of visual imagery works the best in this scenario. And they're the group that I had mentioned I partnered closely with for that games example, when we were like, how do we merge these two visual identities into one product that feels right? They're the experts at that, and we lean on them for that support.

[00:28:19] Host: Excellent. So, how have user behavioral analytics impacted UX design at the New York Times? Designers noticing shifts.

[00:28:35] Libby: We have ongoing user behavior sessions, and it's something we're constantly looking at and bringing into our work. However, Kristen did mention there is sort of a continuity of what we call news needs that has remained pretty consistent over the years. As we continue to do, I was just looking recently at research from the past couple of years for the envisioning project, and it's really stayed strong, the core needs that people have. So we're always checking in and tapping in and looking at that. But what does change is expectations around format, and the particular ways that might start to feel easier, more visuals, more formats that social platforms are leveraging. And so we're aware of that and trying to figure out, what about those things can we integrate into the way we tell stories? Obviously we don't just take it as it is, but we're aware and we're applying that to our work too.

[00:29:43] Host: Excellent, yeah. All right, we have two more minutes. Do you ever feel like the newsroom has, well, let me see. Okay, how about that: what was the process like determining which type of games fit or made sense in the New York Times app?

[00:30:06] Kristen: Sure. So in terms of the games, any of the games that our games team produces, we are kind of a New York Times ecosystem of product, so anything that they're creating that feels like a New York Times game essentially fits within our brand. So we didn't have to do a lot of discussion around which game feels right. But we did do a lot of questioning of, we have a handful of games that we have created and we're continuing to create more games, and if anyone hasn't played Strands yet, I highly recommend it, I'm addicted to it right now. But the question was really how many of the games make sense, and we don't want to cannibalize one product for another, and we want to make sure that we're creating the right balance[?]. So we did a lot of user research, we talked across the organization, had many brainstorm sessions about what was our gut, what felt right. And we ultimately decided, like I had mentioned, that all of the games made sense, because we have different users that like different types of games. Some are more prone to the word games versus some of our other features. So it was really about the cadence and the feature set beyond the core set of games that was decision making for us.

[00:31:30] Host: Nice. Ladies, that was very insightful, thank you very, very much. I think we have a break, so before we go on break I would love for all of you to give Kristen and, sorry, sorry, sorry, Kristen and Libby a big round of applause. Thank you all so much, thank you.