Leave a Review The New York Times
Missing important feature
If you’re younger than 40, you can skip this review. I check the New York Times news feed on the app, or on my computer web browser at least once a day. It goes without saying that the New York Times reporters and staff do a great job reporting the news (well, great job most of the time). But a huge missing feature is the ability to view today’s paper in the format of the printed edition, similar to other American city newspapers Apps. I don’t always want the latest news, sometimes I just want to read today’s paper, and I want to view it in the format of the printed edition. Yes, the app does have a section titled today’s paper, and you can scroll through all the articles, and that format is perfectly fine for people that wish to view it in that format, but for goodness sake, on the weekend I really just like sipping my coffee and looking at the paper, in the old fashion format, even if it is on my iPad screen. Yes, I tried actual weekend home delivery, but where I live home delivery was pretty horrible so we stopped that. p.s. Good luck trying to find a location in the app that allows you to actually provide them feedback like this.Show lessSciFi7
So annoying
I love The NY Times. Their app, however, is frustrating. It takes a long time to load all content. As you are skimming headlines and about to click on an article into which you want to dive deeper, an ad or image somewhere further up or down the page will load, and the article you were about to read disappears up or down the screen, with no indication as to what direction. You then have to scroll to find it again, during which time something else may load and throw you off the trail again. Or, you find the article and as your finger homes in on it, the screen reshuffles and you instead click on a different article, perhaps about the secret lives of dustbins or Wirecutter's favorite spoonrests for under $100, and you then have to wait for that article to load before backing out to the main page to resume your hunt for content actually of interest to you, and nab it before it flees. This happens multiple times every time I open the app. For the amount of money I spend on my unlimited subscription, it is inexcusable.Show lessBumbskull
Great journalism, mediocre app
Look, it’s The NY Times so the articles are generally thoughtful, abundant, and well written.
The app, on the other hand, is just a spinning wheel half the time I open it. It needs to be redesigned with the size of the payload in mind. The today tab has become bloated with too much content which takes ages to fully load. The app seems like it tries to lazy load sections to account for this but given all the rich content (photos, videos, ads) and the short lifespan of that content it still takes a long to render the whole tab and the order in which things load seems arbitrary. On top of that, the containers can’t predict the height of the content which hasn’t yet loaded meaning the page height jumps around as content shows up. The information architecture either needs to be redesigned and broken into more more discrete sections to reduce the page size or the app needs to change the way it fetches content (e.g. using fixed height containers, making separate calls for semantic and media content to speed up perceived load time). This would probably have the second order effect of improving ad performance since the ads frequently fail to render by the time I’ve give up on the app loading.Show lessPetehume
Not as intuitive as it once was
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.”Show lesskelin522
Navigation psychosis
NYT recently updated its navigation. This design update has ripped away a huge amount of joy from my reading NYT reading experience on the iPad—I now spend more time guessing where my back navigation is going to be than reading. Now, before folks peg me as an anti-design evolution user, I will say that it’s great that NYT is trying to evolve the design to make the reading experience better. This incremental (…er…I’m HOPING this is just incremental) design update has created an inconsistency in the app experience though that makes using it extremely cumbersome. Article pages now have a back button at the bottom, while section landing pages (e.g. Business, New York, etc.) still have the back button at the top of the page. Some IA may have convinced designers that this will help users to understand where they are in the app architecture, but it really doesn’t matter. Readers just want to go back. I really don’t care where you put the back button at this point. My only request is that you put it in the same, consistent location everywhere. I’m spending more time navigating the site now than reading the articles.Show lesselliottinlic
Used the app for years, less happy its current form
I have used the app for more than a decade. I haven’t always liked the layout, but I work around it to get to my favorites. The recent version has “Today’s news” and “Section” at the bottom that helps navigate. There is a huge amount of material available everyday, so navigating is crucial. Recently the news summary has disappeared from the top of the screen. I am sorry to see it go. My greatest complaint is that the current app is extremely dependent on a high quality WiFi connection. Previously I could download the day’s news, get on a plane or train, and go to airplane mode but still read the paper. No more! While I read the app is constantly updating. The text jiggles as it adds a photo or alters text. There are times it gets caught in a loop and the jiggle produces a blur of movement. So I have to close the app and start again. Some years ago the developers had allowed an old version to continue but eventually force the switch to the new app. I wish I could go back to that previous version as it was stable even when there were issues with the internet.Show lessEJNYC
Ads+Poor Design = Unusable App
If I could rate this a ‘zero’, I would. Sadly, the user experience really is THAT bad. I’ve been using the Times app for several years, and while the journalism is as always very good, the usability of the app has degraded over time (both the iPad and iPhone versions). The website version is better, possibly because everything loads so much faster, and navigation with the larger screen real estate is better, but it’s still ad-heavy.
I know it’s tempting to push timelines on app development, and it can be challenging working with the 3rd party developers I’m sure have been used here. BUT, proper user testing is a MUST because if it’s not done right you’ll damage your Equity. Not just the Equity of the app, but the NYTimes equity - because apps are now the face of many organization! And for every low-rated review there are at least 10 or more upset users! Most don’t bother to write a review, and potentially a decent fraction will leave as subscribers.
I want the Times to succeed - we desperately need good journalism in these times. Please read and heed the (low-rated) reviews on this site; don’t just look at the numbers!Show lessCincykiwi
Latest “upgrade” is a downgrade
As content, the NYT can’t be beat. But this latest “resdesign” of the app is bad enough to make me write a review for the first time. In a word it is over-designed. When scrolling through the main page, it will suddenly “readjust”, meaning an ad has loaded somewhere in the feed and you have lost your place as it races upwards for you to view it. Once is bad but this happens a couple of times in a single scroll.
When you read an article, the new design has changed the place of the back arrow for part of the navigation but is not the same throughout. I don’t like playing guess where the arrowis. But the biggest and reoccurring issue is the Sections page. What used to be a clear list of sections has now been buried under blocks of articles the NYT wants to spotlight for whatever reason. If I scrolled past it the first time, I don’t need to scroll past it again. I’m here to find a particular section, I know what I want.
Finally, the NYT really, really needs to work on the accuracy of their search function. It is ludicrous that I can’t find an article from 3 days ago using specific keywords. For such great content, it’s criminal to make it disappear. Please do better, NYT!!!Show lesscackalacky007
Please Fix the Software
I love that I can have this app on my Ipad. I love having access to the interesting articles and also some of the games. Being able to read articles in a large font is wonderful because my eyes get fatigued when I try to read the actual hard copy of the newspaper.
I have loved the Spelling Bee game. It was a little hard for me at first because the font was so small and I could not change it, but I could still get through. However, with the latest update, the font is now so huge the larger words run in to each other, making it difficult to read them. Not only that, trying to scroll through the word list from Yesterday is sometimes impossible. When it does work, the font is so large that some of the large words are cut off. Why even have a list if a person cannot view each and every word on it? Also, the Help section no longer works. One must scroll in order to read all of it but the scrolling does not work. So there is not much help here.
Please fix this. It was not broken before the update so for now, I am giving the app only one star.Show lessSchenckypoo
Worst app on my phone
This app is too expensive for the amount of glitches one constantly has to navigate-
Scrolling is always stuck-the bottom half is always missing -except for the ads and the games section at the bottom. Also I watch a lot of movies and series -so I like to read the reviews-however NYT reviews don’t turn up in the search unless they are recent releases and if you search for a review via Google-you only get a minimal amount of “free” reads before it locks you out and says that you have to subscribe to the NYT to read a review any further-but I DO subscribe-and there’s no option to enter my info-so access to entertainment reviews that aren’t current-doesn’t exist-I’ve contacted support about this but no answer has been offered-
Soooo ya the most user-unfriendly subscription that is on my phone
P.S. I don’t understand why access to the recipes is an additional charge for subscribers when you can just Google the NYT recipe and it pop rights up
Thanks for the chance to rantShow lessddaylynn
