The ‘New York Times’ just launched its biggest app redesign in 16 years

With 10.8 million subscribers globally, generating $625.1 million in annual revenue, the New York Times is among the largest and most successful publications in the world. And today, it’s launching its most intensive redesign to its app since the app was launched in 2008.

The app’s significance to the publication cannot be overstated—it’s the New York Times as most people experience it. Ninety percent of subscribers use the app at least once a week, and they spend twice as much time reading in the app as they do on the web. In terms of both serving news and retaining subscribers, it’s the company’s most important product.

Opening the new app won’t feel jarring, even to a daily user. That’s because the core approach to typography and spacing is unchanged, and you still land on Today, the central news feed you’ve known for years. Even the bottom bar, with its Listen, Play, and You tabs is nearly unchanged.

But what’s different is that the Times has ostensibly gone from presenting one feed to 10.

The new New York Times app

The new app features a ribbon on top, which breaks the entire experience into sections, ranging from “news” sections including Lifestyle, Opinion, and a new Election 2024 tab. With the flick of your thumb left or right, you can hop between these different verticals. The core UX metaphor was borrowed from the NYT website (though categories were tweaked for the app), and isn’t so different than flipping through a newspaper to find the section you want.

Visually, it’s all quite familiar. Functionally, the new ribbon is expansive.

“There is hierarchy to this that’s important,” says Alex Hardiman, chief product officer at the Times. “This first and foremost has to be about news . . . so the first step is expanding the canvas for news.”

Reading the NYT on the traditional app was highly accessible, with the biggest news stories of the day (often politics and scandal) listed on top of the feed like a paper’s front page. But only as you scrolled (or dug through submenus) could you find stories focused more on, say, travel or culture. Meaning, it was easy to find the most key headlines of the day, but trickier to come across the rest.

“We want a lot of that coverage to have more exposure,” says Steve Duenes, deputy managing editor overseeing visuals at the Times. “A good way to think about it is [that we’re] unflattening the news report. Mobile can be a challenging space to fully unflatten that report, to create opportunities for serendipitous discovery.”

The ribbon turns one feed into many, and each design is different to match the needs of both tone and information of the section.

The Opinion section, undoubtedly the publication’s most controversial, features tall serif headlines, with the letters squished in tension—an effect I liken to being stuck in a crowded elevator while listening to someone rant.

“We’ll take the credit!” Duenes laughs, while caveating that this wasn’t the design’s intent.

Lifestyle features each story as a photo with the headline layered on top, embracing the image-first experience of social media with a lighter mood and a more immersive experience. “We’re leaning into that space being more frontally dessert,” says Duenes, though I might suggest the team could tweak the presentation ever so slightly to feel more branded to the Times. Election 2024 is a limited-time section (we can only hope), which features the latest poll right on top of the page, all the time, with a variety of stories underneath. Thank goodness there isn’t a needle in sight.

Consolidating NYT brands

Alongside these news sections, the ribbon will also be home to the company’s properties including Cooking, Wirecutter, Games, and The Athletic. Formerly relegated to their own apps, the section brands have been folded into the experience so that you can see recipes or product recommendations within the main NYT app all the time. Though their stand-alone apps will continue to offer a deeper-dive experience.

For the past several years, NYT has used these sections to bolster revenue, offering them as add-ons to the core news product. Now, NYT is focusing on “All Access” subscriptions which include everything bundled in. This growth strategy creates something of a tension. I’d originally assumed that, as a News subscriber, the company would only use the Cooking tab to tease recipes and sell me on a subscription upgrade. But for now, the publication is taking a more generous approach, and making those sections accessible to all subscribers to whet their palette for more.

“We’re admittedly still trying to figure out where and how to draw the lines as to what is the best way to give a window through the News app and hand off to the sub-brand apps [such as Cooking and Wirecutter],” says Hardiman. “But we’re not trying to create an everything-in-one product. There’s a careful balance there.”

After using the new NYT app for the better part of a week, I hopped back onto the old version. While it really does look almost identical in terms of layout and presentation, the old app, without the ribbon, feels infinitely more confining as a single feed. Whether or not this redesign drives revenue growth for what’s already one of the world’s largest subscription media companies will ultimately be irrelevant to most subscribers. Instead they’re likely to appreciate a sensation far more amorphous.

“The app helps you breathe,” says Hardiman. “You open it up, you can take a deep breath, and you don’t feel you’re rushing as much.”