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KATE HARRIS: Hi.
I'm Kate Harris, and I am a mobile product manager that
focuses on Android at the "New York Times." And I'm with--
FARRAH ASSIR: Hi.
I'm Farrah Assir.
I work on our Android App.
I'm a designer.
KATE HARRIS: We were actually on Android pretty early.
Our first app debuted in 2010.
But I think we, like many other publishers and
developers, were very rushed to get something out there.
And we took what we knew, which was iOS at the time, and
tried to make it work on Android.
When Google came out with the design principles with Android
4.0, we were very excited.
And we decided that that was the right time to completely
rehaul what we had and embrace the new principles and
relaunch our app.
In response, we recommitted to Android, I'd say.
FARRAH ASSIR: Yeah.
And I think our goal was to make it more intuitive for
Android users.
And I think that worked.
KATE HARRIS: After a lot of work in September we were able
to relaunch our phone app.
And then quickly after, in December, we launched our
responsive app, which took our phone app and scaled it up so
it looked great on 7-inch tablets and 10-inch tablets.
And so this is what our old article looked like.
And here's our new article.
And Farrah can actually tap into the lead photo and enter
a slideshow.
So it's a much more interactive article
representation.
Just by looking at our list of articles in our old app, which
Farrah is holding on the left, and comparing it with our new
and improved list of articles on the right, you can see
visually just how striking the differences are.
FARRAH ASSIR: Well, it was interesting.
Having those constraints in place actually helped us focus
and push our ideas a little further, kind of thinking
differently than we would have if we just had blue skies.
So it was good to have those suggestions or guidelines and
be able to think about how to make it our
own app within those.
And I think they help a lot with usability.
Android users are familiar with these patterns.
And we were able to work them in and still
make them our own.
Another great thing about the redesign was the way we used
image varieties and just optimized for the device that
the user is on.
So if you look at the tablet, we have these big, beautiful
images that show off our photography.
And then if you look at it on the phone, we take into
consideration conserving data and performance, so we load a
smaller image there.
I think how we made this app feel like the "New York Times"
had a lot to do with typography.
So we were able to integrate our custom
typefaces and our colors.
And the way that we mix typefaces together makes it
feel like the "New York Times."
KATE HARRIS: One thing that's great about the Google Play
store is it allows us to move quicker with new releases.
So now we're actually launching features on Android
first, before we roll them out on our other platforms.
So some of the features that have debuted first on Android
are text-to-speech, and also comments was
rolled out on Android.
And it's something that we're actively working on on our
other platforms, because our users were so
engaged with the content.
So we're continually working to improve the app.
Last week, we just released search,
which is very exciting.
Users can search locally on the device and also search
from the website.
We've seen incredible growth, actually.
Since we relaunched the phone app, our monthly unique users
have gone up over 200%.
And since we launched the responsive app, expanding to
tablet, our tablet numbers have increased by 500%