Not requiring a major overhaul of the existing NYT app, Timely adds a subtle and useful feature to the mobile landing page that will enable the user to read articles at opportune moments throughout a busy day. These moments could include: breakfast, commutes, before a meeting, during a coffee break, kid’s practices or right before bed (good news only at bedtime!).

As one of three key team members, I was responsible for ideation sketches, user interviews, primary and secondary research, wire-framing flows, story-boarding and designing the visual assets in Sketch that would ultimately be prototyped by my team member. We presented the project successfully to the team over at The New York Times.

Quick-fire concept generation via sketches, descriptions and mini storyboards.

The notion of time as the most precious of commodities became apparent in numerous user interviews. We began considering the relationship between calendars and free time.

We tried versions where you could press a button and toggle between a Google calendar and a NYT calendar view of opportunities to read. Testing showed that no one wanted yet another calendar on top of their existing ones.

Testing also gave us new insight. We realized that free time was really free moments. Even the notion of blocking out 10 minutes to read articles was a big ask. No one has that disposable time. You can almost liken it to the fact that 15% of Music Fans Under 25 Have Never Listened to a Full Album.

In modern life, you need to find small slivers of opportunities to provide content. We had to figure out how to better integrate an awareness of time into the product. Further testing showed that if we shortened the experience time, we would get better retention.

Key moments in which TIMELY can be utilized, building lasting habits and affection for the fine writing of The New York Times.