The NYT Games app will also introduce an updated redesign to assist users in finding games and keeping track of their progress more easily. It has been about a year since the New York Times rebranded the games-focused app it had launched in 2014 from "NYT Crosswords" to "NYT Games," in an effort to better signify its growing family of games. Today, it is rolling out a new design with new game card designs and simplified navigation-the company's next step in fleshing out its gaming hub.

A redesign of the app, Jennifer Scheerer, NYT Games' product design director, mentioned in an interview with TechCrunch. The previous version of the app was largely built for crosswords, and as more games were added, the team felt the app had outgrown its previous design and needed to accommodate the growing portfolio of games.

The redesign speaks a much more technologically modern and attractive place to the users. According to the principal product designer at NYT Games, Lian Chang, the redesign of the home page was both for old players and new players.
"The important thing is we want new players to get a sense of the breadth of all the games, so we used a lot of color. The brand icons are very clear and we streamlined the typography," says Chang. So, first-time users should easily find games they'd like to play. For those users who have played a lot of our games, we wanted to make the feel more functional. The game cards on the feed are helpful for discovery when games haven't been played yet.

As soon as a new game is opened, the game card reveals some of the user's progress to make it easier for them to view what they have already played or how far along they are in a puzzle. Chang says the redesigned game cards encourage players to return to a game and complete it. The idea behind the redesigned game cards was to be not only inviting to discovery purposes but also functional: ".

The company wanted also to try and add all the kind of games, archives, and packs in one place for easy navigation to help the users quickly reach the games they wanted.

What we had before was crossword-focused and all the other games were sort of in a horizontal scroll, " Scheerer said. "What we're trying to do is give a list of all of the games we have to make it a little easier to find a new game, and not hide them. So I think this gives room to make it easier to add new games and add more features for games as we go."

The new design has only three tabs at the bottom of the app, compared to the five seen in the old design. "We experimented with a range of numbers and configurations of tabs to figure out what works best," Chang says. After all this experimentation, the team decided to display only "Games," "Stats," and "Leaderboard" to have a cleaner homepage of the app.

Another detail of the redesign is the personalized greetings designed to bring a warm feeling to the players. The greetings, indeed, are time-dependent throughout the day and sensitive, for example, to whether you opened the game at dawn or entered it in the evening to play.

Talking about the future, Chang and Scheerer say they will continue listening to feedback from users as the company continues building out its gaming hub, a project whereby the redesign is not the end of work that the Games team wants to do.