The New York Times: Live News 12+

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 use a VPN (a mainstream, widely available one) and many apps/sites don’t load properly. NYT’s app is odd because it works occasionally, but not usually—I don’t know if this is because of the VPN or if the app is just bad (but it seems to have a bunch of positive reviews so maybe it’s just me?). When I click on a push notification, it opens the app but only goes to the last article that was open, even if it was several weeks ago. Not useful. Then, if I search for the story, it only sometimes loads. I usually end up just using the website or relying on the morning briefing newsletter (so why am I paying for a subscription??). Another annoying aspect of the app is that you can’t zoom in on photos—I find myself doing this a lot on the website because there are interesting things to see and the phone screen is so small; it’s always a frustrating surprise when I try to zoom on the app and nothing happens. Aside from those specific issues, I also find it a little confusing/unintuitive how to find specific stories. Maybe I should be able to answer some questions about what interests me, and then it curates my home page based on my self-reported likes and my past views/reads. I could then use the “sections” page as a backup. Obviously NYT is the gold standard of journalism, but I’m surprised and irritated every time I remember how bad their app is. The app does look nice—I guess that’s worth +1 star.

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.