Introduction

Still on the Friends of Figma Mentorship program, in this episode, I am analyzing an existing UX case study by Johny Vino, Addi Hou and Ke Hu - Redesigning the New York Times app — a UX case study

The team introduced a feature tagged Timely to allow users to read articles at the littlest time based on their schedule and habits. My task is to study the use of the design thinking process in the project and share my learnings. Now, let's dive in.

Prioritizing Boundaries and Research

One of the most important actions I noticed is that the team has set a boundary to stick to the simplest possible solution based on the available time; they highlighted the problems, set goals and presented a proposal to guide them to a possible solution.

Before diving into design, one prominent step was researching the habits of young people who are their target users, so they could easily fit the solution into their lifestyle instead of urging them to use the app.

The team considered secondary data concerning the state of news consumption and primary data from interviewing potential users, these actions kept them on track and ensured they were designing the best possible solutions for the users.

Design Principles and Empathy

To maintain a direct relationship between the results of the interviews and the product interface, the team adhered to a set of design principles to help ensure a useful solution. The principles ensure an intuitive, simple-to-use, beneficial and accessible app, and also ensure that the experience that the experience is seamlessly integrated into users' daily programs without any complicated steps.

The design was executed while considering the thoughts and responses of the potential users.

Ideation and Validation

The team came up with 15 concepts to solve the problem, tested the idea with the VP of Design of the New York Times to determine the sustainability and viability of the notions and also asked the test groups to vote for the best idea. This is to ensure that the final prototype provides users with the best possible solution.

After a series of storyboarding, wireframing, prototyping, testing and continuous iteration, they were able to determine the best possible solution for users based on the conducted interviews, available data, previous habits and feasibility.

Conclusion

The team followed an iterative design process to implement a feature to let users read articles and news based on their schedules and habits in 2 to 5 minutes.

The design team highlighted possible improvements in the design.

The UX case study pointed out the importance of a design process [ in this case - stating problems and concepts, determining audience, needs and scope, empathy and sketches, wireframes and design critics, visual design, storytelling and prototyping ] in creating the best possible solution.

Thank you for reading💜