Update: How to enhance your product. The New York Times experience

By Alisa Ivanitskaya

Although some news junkies want to stay current and updated, they are not always offered the engaging news product throughout the day, said Kellen Henry, a journalist, and a product manager at The New York Times where she works on Times’ app. She met with journalism students at the University of Arizona to share Times’ approach to serving its dedicated readers.

Identify a problem

From media analytics, the Times found that their app readers go on information detox after getting their first news-bite in the morning. Do people want more news but they are not served, or do people deliberately “fast”? With this question in mind, Henry’s team conducted preliminary small scale interviews. They’ve learned engaged readers actively look out for Times content but get it from other sources like reporters’ Twitter or even other media, which means Times news app doesn’t “deliver the excitement of news” throughout the day.

Research and solutions

Research is the first step before brainstorming the solutions. So the Times team went on the second round of interviews to learn the habits and reading patterns of 30–40 Times readers. You should be aware, warns Henry, not to ask people for solutions but dive into their routines and habits. Among important insights is the current trend of reducing time spent on social media. People hide from themselves their favorite social media apps, like Twitter, and use trackers to control their screen time, Henry said.

Only after processing the results, the team brainstormed the solutions. Although the team can be extremely free in their creative process, the options that will become prototypes are limited by resources the team has, the state of modern technology and just common sense.

Prototyping and testing

The next step is creating prototypes. Prototypes can be very simple, like paper clips you will show to your focus group (just look at this paper phone with paper screen from the NYT). The next round of interviews helped the team identify the ideas that will be developed and tested broadly through beta-testing on “real readers”. For example, currently the Henry’s team idea is tested on 170,000 Android Times app users in the U.S. The focus group includes not only people from different demographics (nationality, gender, different geographical regions, income) but also current engaged readers, newcomers, subscribers, and non-subscribers. Seeing that ideas and assumptions are wrong is a painful but inevitable part of the process.

Assessment

Innovation for the sake of innovation is meaningless, says Henry. To make most of the new ideas, developers have criteria for success. Do people who see the new feature return to the app more frequently than readers from the control group? Do people want to share the content they see? Do they want to pay for it and turn into subscribers? Is the solution cost-effective? While testing the new feature, the Times team started to get stories from their readers about inside-jokes around news and shared experiences around the news with other users who are not part of the test, so the update is likely to be released soon to a broader audience.