The New York Times 12+

I am a product director on another large scale mobile app, and I love the NYT app. It’s visually appealing and thoughtful and I appreciate so many of the changes you guys have made throughout the past years. My only wish, is that you stop moving the “most popular” articles section. First it was a carousel (my favorite), then you limited it to a list view of only 4, then it was moved to a completely different part of your navigation and I had to search for it, and now it’s gone. I can’t find it. I enjoy seeing what’s most read for several reasons and am bummed it’s gone. If I could make one request, please bring this back to your timeline.

An additional comment - I find your newer navigation confusing. You’ve essentially moved the whole navigation under “browse”, not an immediately obvious title for this. And “for you” is not relevant to me, what I read, or what I do. I literally play spelling bee every, single, day and hate that I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of timeline (while it’s updating which pushes me up the timeline, to only have to scroll down more) to get to it. If “for you” was really stuff I use, it should have spelling bee but it doesn’t.

This is the only app review I’ve ever written, i promise. And I’m writing it more because I love the content and the app but wish these few things could change. Leaving feedback because I’m hoping it’s helpful!

As content, the NYT can’t be beat. But this latest “resdesign” of the app is bad enough to make me write a review for the first time. In a word it is over-designed. When scrolling through the main page, it will suddenly “readjust”, meaning an ad has loaded somewhere in the feed and you have lost your place as it races upwards for you to view it. Once is bad but this happens a couple of times in a single scroll.

When you read an article, the new design has changed the place of the back arrow for part of the navigation but is not the same throughout. I don’t like playing guess where the arrowis. But the biggest and reoccurring issue is the Sections page. What used to be a clear list of sections has now been buried under blocks of articles the NYT wants to spotlight for whatever reason. If I scrolled past it the first time, I don’t need to scroll past it again. I’m here to find a particular section, I know what I want.

Finally, the NYT really, really needs to work on the accuracy of their search function. It is ludicrous that I can’t find an article from 3 days ago using specific keywords. For such great content, it’s criminal to make it disappear. Please do better, NYT!!!

The NYT is full of great and varied content, so this review is not about the content, just the app. They’ve made a few updates to the UI in the past few months, each making the app less intuitive. I used to view my history or saved articles a lot when I didn’t have time to finish reading a good story. This used to be easily accessible in a side menu. Now it’s way more hidden, and I have to click a bunch of times to get to it. I can never remember where it is.
Also, the back button is now on the bottom of the screen for most articles, except when you view certain articles like through wire cutter. Everytime I want to click back at the top of the screen (where the back button is located on nearly every UI), it’s not there. Sometimes there is a back button at the top of the screen when you click on a link through the article. I clicked on this to bring me back to the article, but instead it took me to the front page. And then I couldn’t find the article that I was just reading. Frustrating!

These are just examples and sound like small, nit-picky things, but when you are constantly trying to figure out where to click, it adds time and makes the app annoying to use. I wish the UI developers prioritized common sense changes rather than just making the app “prettier.”