The New York Times: Live News 12+

Growing up the New York Times was a staple in our household. Both my parents paper in hand coffee in another. Though I always had a semi awareness of what was going on in far off places with names like Darfur Like many teenagers I was pretty uninterested in the goings on outside of the of my group of friends and as far as i was concerned in a spreading metropolis like Los Angeles the world began & ended in our little pocket of it. Though my horizons naturally got bigger once i got out into the world my interest in the going ons of the world still held little appeal. This started to gradually change in my late 20's and without warning geopolitics and history suddenly started to become very appealing to me and feeling I had missed out on years years of changing politics & history I had no idea where to even begin .
That is when the New York Times entered my household. I would pick articles to read daily and then online fill in all the blanks .
This morning ritual became my favorite part of the day. There was this big exciting world out there full of history that i could not get to fast enough. Now some 10 years later The New York times ( and of course The Daily too) are along with several other publications have become a staple in my household as well.
The New York times is a place to me/ a place full of childhood nostalgia ; a roap map to another world. It's where my childhood and entree into adulthood intersect

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.