Design at the Speed of the News
summary
The New York Times redesigns the homepage to handle volume and speed: ~180+ articles publish daily but only ~80 slots show, so a modular Spotlight 2.0 system ships Sep 21 2020 and lets editors stack packages; it runs smoothly on its trial (Trump taxes on Sep 27) with no P1s and supported 43 COVID stories during 122 of 214 days (57%). Live coverage uses three formats (briefing, blog, chat) powered by live admin plus Slack→Google Sheets workflow and GitHub pushes; some experiments like visual updates fail and are retired.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00NYT design teams intro
- 1:13Designing for news cycles
- 3:02Speed versus brand integrity
- 6:16Homepage mission
- 10:47Evolving Spotlight
- 13:33Spotlight during COVID-19
- 16:25Spotlight 2.0 modular system
- 18:11Spotlight tests Trump’s taxes
- 22:27Introducing live coverage
- 26:37Iterative design in news
- 29:51Streamlining live updates
- 31:36Trust with newsroom
- 34:43Engineering for rapid launches
- 36:51Failed design experiments
- 37:33Four learnings at news speed
- 39:04Q&A
related talks
41mRedux: Architecting and scaling a new web app at The NY Times
29mCrossing the Chasm: The Journey of The New York Times IDP from Conception to Early Majority
51mDesigning For Competing Goals
19mDesigning for Unpredictable Content
15mThe Future of Journalism - Part 1
27mA Case Study from The Guardian's Product Design Team - Tricky Bassett
47mThe Map & The Territory
56mBig Bang Redesign: Smashing Magazine’s 2017 Relaunch, a Case Study