New York Times Reader
Custom cross-platform desktop application for online and offline reading of the New York Times
The New York Times sought my team’s support in conceptualizing a cross-platform desktop application to replace their Windows-only product. Their Windows-only solution had been built by Microsoft and did not scale well nor did it accurately reflect their NYT brand. We worked closely with the Times’ Design and R&D teams to craft a solution built on top of the newly released Adobe AIR cross-platform desktop runtime. As a result, the New York Times was delivered with a brand-aligned consistent experience that functioned identically on Windows, Mac and Linux as well as on smaller mobile notebooks.
ROLE
Director of User Experience, Head of Product Incubation Lab, Product Strategist
SCOPE
Product Strategy, Product Design Direction, Innovation with Partners, Client Management
AUDIENCE
Consumers, Newspaper Publishers
PROBLEM
The New York Times sought to drive greater adoption in the market by introducing a cross-platform solution to deliver their high quality branded reading experience for content across Windows, Mac, and Linux.
STRATEGY / COLLABORATION
My team partnered with the New York Times Design and R&D teams to conceptualize a solution that leveraged Adobe’s newly released AIR technology, a promising cross-platform runtime. We ideated on not only the user experience for content consumption but also strategies for building customer loyalty. By creating a daily habit for our users by downloading the paper’s news for the day automatically, users began to open the NYT Reader app first thing each day. In addition, we pushed late-breaking updates throughout the day from a feed anytime the user was online, building trust in the content authority.
To ensure the NYT brand was maintained, we rendered content using the NYT’s custom fonts and ensured that the columns of text scaled and paginated gracefully even as the user resized the application window or increased or decreased the font size (a solution later termed ‘responsive design’).
Our design goal was to replicate all of the characteristics of the classic New York Times, but in a portable, digital format.
In addition to news articles, the application introduced gamification by providing NYT's first interactive crossword puzzle, increasing return user engagement with the app. Perhaps the most powerful driver of user adoption came from the app-only content types like video news content, a list of most-emailed articles, and a unique ‘browse mode’ allowing users to zoom out of the current article to gain visual context as to where they were at in the grand scheme of the day’s paper.
SOLUTION
While the New York Times owned their content, Adobe retained the rights to any intellectual property for the technology we built. This allowed Adobe to generalize the solution for two additional newspapers and to build a strategy around how to productize it for additional types of content producers.
The Times launched the application to wide praise from the press and its subscribers, especially those on Macintosh and Linux who had not been able to use the previous version of the app. A senior executive from the Times joined Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch on stage at the Adobe MAX conference to demonstrate this high-profile showcase of an Adobe AIR application in use in the real world.
Partners
New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe
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