The New York Times: Live News 12+

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.”

As a 30+ year subscriber to the New York Times, I wholeheartedly see it as an excellent newspaper and applaud its commitment to professional journalism. Insofar as the journalistic content delivered through the app, I give it 5-stars. That said, the design of the app needs some fine tuning. It is not as intuitive as other apps. I also subscribe to The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. Each of those apps offers a smoother user experience. But the most important difference between the NYT app and each of those other news apps is that the NYT app doesn’t permit swiping from one article to the next. Once I finish an article, I need to hit the app’s back button and manually select the next article. This makes the app cumbersome, particularly when I’m attempting to read the entire paper. What is concerning is why the app is set up this way. I can only assume that swiping from one article to the next doesn’t provide the Times with the click data it is looking for, either about me and my reading preferences or so that it can better track clicks of an article by all readers. Either way, the inability to swipe between articles has me relying on the other news apps as my primary news apps, with the Times as a secondary app.
Dear New York Times, please correct this.

I love the NYT, so this mediocre rating is simply due to the usability/customizability of the app. There is no night mode, which just feels a little behind the times in terms of the various display options that have now become standard in most phone & tablet apps.

I also personally wish there was slightly more customizability in terms of being able to block or hide certain categories of articles from appearing. For example, although we can choose what subjects we are interested in, which will then show up in the “For You” section, I would also love the option of telling the app what NOT to show me when scrolling through the main feed. For me specifically, I don’t like reading Opinion pieces and will never open them, so it’d be great for me in terms of usability if I could just have the app “hide” those when I’m scrolling through (or hide the entire Opinion section). Other people may never read the Entertainment section, or the sports section, etc., so perhaps they’d like to be able to scroll through the main “Today” section without seeing those. It would just be a nice, extra option that could continue to help shape the content to what each reader enjoys the most.