Design Notes

Setting the Foundation for NYT Audio’s Future

A year into the release of NYT Audio, we began to wonder how we might take greater strides to evolve the app. We wanted to grow our weekly active audience. And with more investment in audio happening cross-product, we wanted to ride the momentum of the speedy release of NYT Audio—the first successful app launch at the Times in nine years—to continue with aggressive experimentation.

As the Staff Designer on the app, and the most senior IC, I organized a large-scale initiative alongside Daman Chatha, a designer on our team, and our product and engineering leads to brainstorm and implement three separate visions for the app.

Getting the team inspired
To kick things off, I organized a three day workshop with a large group of cross functional audio experts. Naming it after the music festival, Lollapalooza, I branded the workshop as “Audiopalooza” to build in a little fun and excitement.

I set up the first day as a kickoff with talks from senior leadership and our insights team to help inspire and set the stage. Then the rest of the days were dedicated to a rapid-fire round of crazy 8s and team sketching, ending with concept pitches.

At the end of the workshop, we collectively generated over 1000 ideas and 25 unique concepts for what the app could be—everything from a hub of multimedia content to a smart audio assistant.

Feedback
I was generally pretty excited by the outcomes of the workshop. Not only did we leave the three days with plenty of high quality ideas to sift through, but also the feedback from participants was overwhelming positive.

Some very kind words from my colleagues 🫶🏽 —

Synthesis
Digging through all the sketches and concepts in our FigJam, I led a our small core team of project leads through several rounds of synthesis discussions. We conducted various sizing and priority exercises to land on three concepts that we felt showed the most promise. The concepts were —

1. Reasonably feasible to build.

2. Posed interesting hypotheses for how we might increase week-to-week retention

3. Aligned with various projects happening across the company

I’ll walk through two of the concepts that we’re currently pursuing and looking to build and release in the coming months.

Concept 1: Snippets
In this concept, we have an assumption that multimedia snippets can act as rich previews to give users a sense of what a story is about. I created a prototype as a provocation to share with stakeholders to paint a future vision for how this concept could manifest.

Our stakeholders were pretty confident in this concept as an initial direction to pursue—especially given that other audio surfaces in the NYT core app were also beginning to explore the role of videos. And so, we set out to begin fleshing out the concept further.

I facilitated a workshop with our team to begin articulate key features for the concept, which helped us form an initial blueprint of where we could begin.

With a sense of product requirements in place, I sketched out a pretty simple flow for what we could build. I recommended to the team that we follow Dan Mall’s hot potato process (who is currently consulting on the Times’ design system team). This would mean that we focus less on deliverables, and more on open communication and back and forth collaboration with the engineers and editorial team.

Working with Daman, we paired with the engineers and our editors to flesh out key features of the concept. I played a consultation role, as Daman led design to set some decisions with the backend team on how our videos would be generated and how the publishing tool should work to allow for editorial input in snippet generation.

We are currently working towards finishing the build, which we will launch as an experiment in our app in the fall. To mitigate risks with affecting engagement during the election cycle, we will be launching this as a new tab to a smaller percentage of our audience.

Here is a video of the build as it stands. Plenty of things to address, but it’s working!

Concept 2: Search-First
In the second concept that we landed on coming out of Audiopalooza, we are aiming to explore how we might build a search-first experience powered by GenAI.

The idea is that you can open up the app, tell it what you want to hear, and receive a personalized playlist of content.

Here is a prototype I created to share to show a potential future direction. Daman contributed to the visuals, and I incorporated my voice, a voice from ElevenLabs, and sound UI that I designed.