Matt Raw: Balancing legacy and innovation at The New York Times

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23:08Matt Raw:This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was. the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

23:41And now, back to the show.

23:48Information architecture in, I think, a lot of places has sort of faded into the background. But it strikes me that the times of all places really, really needs thoughtful information architecture for discovery and movement through all of this content. And there were some major IA changes in the past couple years. Could you talk us through that process and how you and your team think about information architecture these days? It is really important. Under the hood, there's tons of metadata that describes and categorizes the journalism. And some of that then we find ways to express in the user experience.

24:28So you might be thinking of the relaunched news app last year where we introduced the top kind of ribbon of navigation. One of our main goals there was to help introduce people to the breadth of things that the Times could offer. We would hear over and over from people. We'd do interviews and user research. They would tell us that they know there's things that they're missing. They know there's parts of the product that they would find valuable, but they just can't find it. And so that is fundamentally a sort of information architecture, a findability kind of problem. So the process of creating that ribbon that started actually a while before it launched, We did a larger envisioning process where we looked at the news product as a whole and said, where do we think it should be, say, three years from now?

25:11And coming out of that, we had a number of opinions about what would make it great, what it needed to do. And one of those was that it needed to sort of create a larger canvas for the news. And so you see now that we have a lifestyle panel. We have a wire cutter panel that you can go to, opinion. All of those are places where it allows a little bit different kind of expression of editorial judgment, also a different texture to what you'll see and feel there. Each of them have a little bit of a different feel to them, similar in some ways to sections in a newspaper from long ago. Matt, how do you think about striking a balance between the needs of the users and customers and the business needs?

25:52And again, this can be more high level, but I know on a much, much, much tinier scale, Aaron and I think about this a lot because we want to make a really great product and we want to provide value for people, but it's also our job, so we have to make some money. Times has a big company, expensive real estate here in Manhattan. You've got to pay the bills. What's that balance like for you? It's a constant conversation for us. One of the unique things about working at a media organization is that you're balancing not only what a user needs and is trying to do, but you're also balancing what the business needs and is trying to do.

26:20Not unlike another company, but you also are trying to balance what the newsroom and its journalists are trying to accomplish. As a result, you're constantly thinking about all those things and finding the sort of overlap and all of those concerns that will ultimately create a really great experience. I think in general, the way we think about striking the balance between the user experience and the business needs is ideally we look for business needs that have a very natural sort of expression in the product. We try really hard not to do things that feel off to users or don't make sense. If we're asking them to take an action to subscribe, let's say, we want to be really clear about the value that they get by doing that.

26:53So we've created this sort of deliberate state as a non-subscriber where you get a little bit for free, but you don't get the whole thing. And we think a lot about sort of how to move people from that non-subscribed state to a subscribed state. And the product does a lot of the work there. We think about the different moments where it feels appropriate to ask somebody to subscribe, but also doesn't necessarily block them from doing the thing that they came to do, which is they came to read a story or something like that. We want to make sure that they get that information, but also make it really clear that there's so much more beyond that story that if they subscribe, they'll have access to.

27:27Are there design values that guide the work that your team is doing? When I interact with the Wirecutter or games, recipes, et cetera, they're different. I mean, they look very much like different products, but they still feel like, well, they came from the New York Times. There's some common feelings that I get from those. They're friendly. They're erudite. They definitely feel a little elevated. But presumably, there are different teams working on each one of these products. How do you unite that? Going back to that earlier question, what are the design values that guide it? Yeah, I think that there are a couple ways we unite it.

28:07One is less about values and just more about systems. You think about maybe a design system. one of the advantages of being in a company that's been around for so long is you have pretty sophisticated systems of type and layout and things like that, just ways that we present information that we don't have to necessarily constantly relitigate those things. And I think you see some of that in common across all these products, even when you have very different types of content. Like you have games, obviously it's quite different from a recipe or a live breaking news story. But there's definitely some DNA that's just encoded in those design systems that I think helps with that feeling of it all coming from the same place.

28:44In terms of values, we do have a set of, we call them UX tenets. They are a set of principles that are meant to complement some of the objectives we have both in our newsroom and on the business side. There are things like clarity or making sure that we are achieving, we call uncommonly high levels of craft. They're meant to be kind of opinionated things that would help us not only evaluate work but decide that when it's time to sort of put it out into the world that it really hits that standard that the Times is known for. So being that you're in the business of news and I know you have other products, games, and things like that, but at least personally, I found that occasionally, during especially turbulent times, I just have to take a little break from the news and just find something else to occupy my mind or get outside.

29:28And I'm curious how you personally think about that or for your team when there's a lot of stuff going on and you might just need a break in order not to burn out. Yeah, I can think of that in a couple ways. In one way, that's kind of the beauty of the strategy we have at The Times is that we offer this bundle of products that if the news becomes too much, there are other things you can do with your life that still feel like, in the case of games, it's like you can still have smart fun. You can still feel like you're doing things that are enriching your life. So strategically, I just sort of love that about what we've created here is that we have other outlets if the news has become overwhelming.

30:00When you ask sort of personally, I think one of the things that we've talked a little bit about on the design team is there are these moments where the news intrudes on the work. It becomes so pressing that you can't not look at it. And it's interesting because you work with the news all day, you can actually start to become kind of blind to what actually you're putting in these mock-ups and these prototypes. But there certainly are moments where the outside world presses in. And I think we have just really tried to ensure that designers or anyone really at the times feels like they are able to step back if they need to.

30:31They're able to talk to a friend, a colleague, things like that. We've tried to be pretty deliberate about knowing that this phenomenon exists. And during times of sort of overwhelming news, it can be a tough place to work. But just by recognizing that and giving folks a little time and space to step back if they need it, that's really one of the ways that you can kind of strike a balance personally. You mentioned earlier that part of your process in the team is to always stay connected to your users, people who are using the product on a regular basis. Presumably, that's a very broad demographic.

31:05And with games, it definitely seems like there's a younger demographic. Just speaking anecdotally, customer of one here, but my children, who are 11 and 15, are using the New York Times every day because it's in this school. We're always talking about Wordle. And if we're at a restaurant, first thing my kids say is, hey, let's do the Wordle or let's do strands or something like that together. So it's interesting that the times the demographic is shifting. How do you think about designing for different demographics, especially for younger folks? I have the same thing with my kids. My son loves to grab the phone and start playing strands and things like that.

31:42And I couldn't point to necessarily a strategy or a document that says, you know what, strands or games generally is going to be how we sort of go after. the next generation of news consumers. But it does sort of have the effect of working that way, right? Games are such an inclusive thing. Some of our games, you don't even have to speak English to play them and have fun, right? And so that opens up huge new audiences for us, potentially, who could come into the Times ecosystem and over time, maybe decide that there's more than just games that they're interested in. In terms of how we design for those audiences, I think it is a very broad, you know, it's a mass market kind of product.

32:16We want to reach as many people as we can. And we talk a lot about the curious sort of being our target audience and anyone who's curious about the world being somebody that we might be able to serve. So you have to kind of break that down a little bit. Curiosity is a huge, very human motivation. But to break that down, we think a lot about jobs to be done, meaning what is it that someone has turned to the times to help them with in their life. So in the case of games, it could be just having a moment of relaxation and fun. With any of our products, there's probably a different job that somebody's sort of hiring us for.

32:48We stay in touch with users. Obviously, we do a lot of interviewing and research. Shout out to our audience insights group. We love working with them in design. They do a great job of recruiting very widely. And so we do get a chance, I think, to get exposed to lots of different folks' opinions, their habits and routines that ultimately inform how we design things and we hope make for a better experience at the end of the day. A big part of our audience is very curious about generative AI and how it inserts itself into the workflow of different organizations. At the same time, many organizations have restrictions around how you might or might not use it.

33:22I'm curious if you can talk to that at all here, how it fits into your process or experimentation. I think there are a couple ways we're leaning in. One way is in thinking about the ways that generative AI might help us make either better journalism or better product experiences, so things that ultimately our audiences would see and use. The other is around how Gen.ai might change the way that we produce those internally, So how a designer might create a prototype, let's say. On the first one, as far as how we make better experiences for our audiences, one of my colleagues, Zach Seward, has been leading some really interesting work within the newsroom about ways that we can employ generative AI in contexts like investigative reporting.

34:03There was a piece that ran right before the election, and it was called Inside the Movement Behind Trump's Election Lies. The Times had sort of gained access to hundreds of hours of recordings of a group that was primarily concerned with sort of election interference. But the challenge was we wanted to obviously publish this before Election Day. There simply wasn't enough time to review all of that footage and to figure out sort of what the story was. So Zach and his team employed generative AI to help analyze hundreds of hours of footage of these meetings and try to identify some of the most salient parts of those conversations.

34:36and then use the power of our newsroom to verify that those were actually, in fact, salient things and ultimately to write a story on a deadline that got published before Election Day. And Zach sort of calls this like AI in the middle, where it's human first, then AI, and then human last. And I really like that kind of framing. That's an example of one of the ways that we think generative AI can help in the process of telling the stories that we need to tell and in this particular case, helping us do it in a way that was much faster than would have been possible before. As far as designing how we work, that's the other place I think that generative AI tooling has really started to change.

35:12Although I will say it feels very early days to me. We are experimenting with lots of different tools. But I think one of the things that I sort of noticed right away within design, although I suspect this is not just unique to design, is getting over that initial skepticism of, is this tool here to take my job or something like that? And I think once you get past that and see it more as an enabler of things that you already do, and maybe you can do them faster than you did them before, I think then we're really starting to see like, oh, here's some places like in our creative process where this tool might help us get to a prototype faster.

35:44And because we can get to that prototype faster, maybe we can get to our user research faster. Maybe we can get insights back faster than we did before. So we're starting to see a little bit of that. But again, it's so early that it feels like we're in the midst industry-wide of reckoning with the tools that we use and figuring out, okay, well, what does this one do that will help me? And does it change our overall process or not? But at the end of the day, I'm really pretty optimistic that while these tools are going to change how we work, we're starting to see it already. But the things that designers bring to the table, empathy, user-centricity, taste, judgment, I don't see that going anywhere.

36:18And these tools might help us pull some of those judgments and those decisions that designers make up earlier in the process, but I don't see them replacing the need for that. So I'm optimistic overall about the ways that these tools will help us do our jobs better, but no doubt it's changing. It's changing every day. We hear a lot about lines being blurred. So specifically between design and engineering, but in other disciplines as well. And you mentioned earlier that prototyping is something that you're thinking about with AI. And we used to prototype with like, it's a picture. It's like a click map type of thing where you could click through, and now we're just straight up building that thing very quickly and very simply.

37:02If you have some basic coding knowledge, vibe coding, using AI to sort of support your ideation, it's pretty straightforward. Is that something that's finding its way into your workflow? Yes, I have seen that. As far as to what extent it's blurring lines, I think that's really what we are in the process of learning right now. But yeah, without a whole lot of training in these tools, pretty much anyone can create a prototype. And that's kind of cool. But the same sort of thinking and rigor needs to apply to these prototypes that would have applied prior to having Gen.AI tooling, which is, what's the purpose of the prototype?

37:35What are you trying to learn from it? And are you putting it in front of the right audiences in order to be able to learn and make decisions and move forward and really validate that the thing that you're making is the right thing? I'm sure we are going to have lots of interesting conversations about at what point in the process does a designer step into the prototype versus an engineer. But I suspect that the purposes of those prototypes are going to be very different still. And that some of the things we might be trying to solve for in design still kind of remain uniquely within the domain of design.

38:03Such as validating that it meets a need for our users. Trying to assess impacts to our own internal workflows if we're doing internal systems, things like that. One of the reasons we're here is our mutual friend, Meredith Black, is a leading figure in the design ops world and has been helping out the times here with some design ops-related things. Tell us a little bit about how that's important here for your own teams and the way you do your work. Yeah, design ops is hugely important. Prior to the role I'm in now, I set up our first design operations function within product design, leaned heavily on Meredith's advice and wisdom as well to do that.

38:38We'd been talking about it for a while, that it was a thing that we knew we needed, but didn't have. But once we started doing it, you just really felt it immediately. I would get notes from folks being like, I'm so glad somebody else is thinking about this or handling this for us. Design ops within the product design team at the time is still pretty small. And so we have to be very strategic about what we choose to take on. And we think a lot in terms of what are things that we can do that will work for everyone or work for a large number of people. So as a result, we tend to focus on processes and things like that where we all participate.

39:10So getting really buttoned up about our hiring processes, let's say, or performance management, or honestly, just even things that like day to day, like, can I buy this book or not? Like, the answer is always yes, by the way. You know, being able to just sort of take those little things off of people's plates across a team of 85 and you start to feel it right away. Again, people have sort of told us that this is very beneficial to them. But then you also see it in terms of, you know, it frees up just a little bit more of their time to do what they do best, which is create really amazing work and not have to worry about, you know, spend 15 minutes wondering if the times will pay for that book.

39:45You talked about design systems and how that design system grows as, you know, new story types evolve. Tell us what that looks like. Where does that design system live? How do people access it? And is there a librarian that sort of maintains that? because that seems like a vast, vast design system at an organization like this. I think of this in kind of two ways. There's the literal sort of design system, literal in the sense of like there's code, there are Figma components, there are things like that that you can go and pull into your designs or use to ship a product. I think then also of something even broader than that that's maybe a more conceptual kind of design system, which are just some of the patterns and ways of publishing that we've developed over the years that may not necessarily be captured one-to-one in code, but shape how we approach different projects.

40:36I've worked really closely with our design systems team over the last several years, and they're constantly sort of challenged with the problem of across all of these different teams where we're working on all these different products, what are the things that we can produce that we can put into a design system that would help them move faster and deliver things more consistently at a higher quality? And it's easy to say that, But it's actually really hard to sort of find those overlaps and to align those groups on, hey, if we create this component with you, it'll save you this amount of time in your prototyping or in your delivery of a piece of work.

41:11A lot of the design system work at the times really boils down to that. Where there are established patterns or things that multiple teams need that we can pull into one place. Should have a librarian. I love that idea. But pull it into one sort of library that can then be accessed and used by lots of other teams. Matt, before we hit record, we were talking a little bit about books that we're reading right now. And we're curious, it doesn't have to be a book. It could be something else, art, it could be a podcast, it could be music that you're finding inspiring. Or your family, you mentioned that you have kids that are roughly my kid's age.

41:44And I know we're finding some fun stuff together too. Lots of things come to mind. So for what I'm reading, I was telling Aaron, I'm a very slow reader. So I've been slowly working my way through a ministry for the future. I love sci-fi, but I also love sci-fi that's sort of grounded in some sort of realism. A 180 from that, I also just started subscribing to Fine Woodworking magazine. The little free time I have, I love to try to make things with my hands. I think that's a very common thing for people who work in digital context. So anyway, that's a very inspiring, beautiful kind of magazine of things I'll probably never quite get to.

42:18My daughter right now, she's in middle school, but her favorite class is essentially woodshop. And she's made some really beautiful things. She made an end table for us. She just made a ukulele. And I dig it. That's where I started my design career was in physical products. So maybe I passed a little bit on to her. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, mine, I'm totally digital. So to me, this is all kind of new and fun. As far as what we read or watch with our kids, it's funny. Sometimes it's an exercise in finding that like lowest common denominator. Like what's the thing? So I think of things like, you know, we all love Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse.

42:51That's great. Yes. Great movie. We had the production designer on the show. a little while ago. Oh, I should check that out. I didn't know. Love that movie. My son's really into One Piece books. I don't know. Do you know that series? Yes. Yeah, my son is also into One Piece. Yeah, it's just one of those that goes on and on. I think he's on book 79. My kids are 10 and 15. And so, you know, what it is that all four of us like. A Venn diagram is very narrow. It's a very narrow Venn diagram. Yes. Yes. That's great. Well, Matt, thank you so much for being on Design Better. And thank you for hosting us here at the New York Times.

43:24My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

43:54and code, allowing one person to design and build with creative freedom. For Noise, Wix isn't just a platform, it's an extension of the entrepreneur's mind, letting ideas become reality before breakfast. To learn more about Wix Studio, go to wix.com slash studio. My name's Chris Henry. I'm the general manager of Noise, or the CEO. I co-founded Noise with Simon back in 2016. I'm Simon. I'm the chairman and head strategist at Noise. And I help Chris take the business to new markets and champion the growth of the business. I think the biggest change is the speed and the instant feedback loop that you get when you're working with an editor like Wix.

44:38We call it rapid development. That's because we're genuinely developing on the daily with our clients' websites. In the old days, it was spend weeks designing something, get approvals, then spend weeks developing something from a website development perspective, and then present that for approval. And then go, there was this back and forth long process that was drawn out over weeks and weeks. Whereas now you can build a website in a couple of hours. That sort of big agency mentality is a thing of the past. There are still big agencies, but they think differently now. there's a lot more room for people to have change and to create change inside of organizations and their clients using that core skill of designs.

45:20As you grow in this industry you realize that where the real magic is made isn't in the boardrooms it's on the computer creating those designs that's going to have the change for those customers and we're able to do that on the Wix platform because it's quick you get an instant feedback loop you can do things like A-B testing and it's a complete game changer for small agencies. One of the other major benefits, I think, with Wix and these really like what we call rapid development programs is it also allows you to work with the best talent in the world in an effective way through that contractor methodology.

45:53Like we've got people in every continent that build websites for us. The most important thing about being an entrepreneur is being able to wake up from a dream where you dreamt a cool idea and wake up and literally put that into action the second you get up, like before you even have breakfast. You know, add a new page to the website. That's what Wix is. Wix is like the extension of the business owner's psyche. They can just do it at the minute they think of it. The things you can achieve inside of the Wix framework are highly, highly flexible. There's not a lot you can't do. And whatever you're lacking in your creative team, you can kind of lean on Wix for.

46:31You don't have to put everything in Wix, but you can. Having that flexibility means you can go to market very quickly with an MVP. At the end of the day, that's what being successful in business is about, getting to the money quicker. One of the big advantages of Wix, but also one of the considerations you've got when you're dealing with your end customer is you want to have a really good balance between what is functionally a good website from a conversion perspective, but what is also visually something that showcases your talent and your ability as a developer. and then finding a good balance between those two.

47:05And I think Wix's ability to mix interactions and animations and then all the different sections in such a seamless way really made that possible. So our site, it's got a lot of wow factor, but functionally it's also very, very good from a conversion perspective. I think the key is that it's taken the divide between visual creatives and coders and brought them together or actually made them the same person almost. So now someone who lives in that user interface design land, that GUI kind of segment of the creative process, they can have ideas and be able to implement those ideas themselves without having to outsource those to a developer.

47:53We create noise ninjas because it's like we would rather have one guy that is a killer designer and then literally build his own website inside of Wix and make the system operate in the way that he envisaged it from a design perspective. So rather than being all disjointed, it's driven by one human now. That's a game changer. Inside of how creative you can be with Wix and the tools that it has, the most exciting part about that is that there's so much unmapped territory. The ability to be creative and be the leader of your field inside of the Wix framework is huge. We are doing things in Wix that no one's ever done before every day.

48:32The cool thing about Wix is they're developing bleeding edge tech that you can get your hands on and work out how am I going to use this to my maximum advantage. The best place is our website, noise, N-O-I-Z-E dot com dot U. Just, you know, fill out a brand audit form or hit the contact us and we'll be in touch.

48:56This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time. Thank you.