Times Live App

This year, The Times has rebuilt its flagship Times Live mobile app with the aim of deepening engagement among the title’s 600,000 digital subscribers. Our ability to retain a paying reader increases by 50% if a reader uses the Times Live mobile app regularly, so reader engagement on the app is critical to the future of our business. The key problem to solve was making it easier for readers to find their favourite topics, authors and games among the 185 stories we publish on average daily. This was done by building a new “Top Stories” section designed to take you deeper into the app, with navigation through to nine vertical areas of coverage: UK, World, Comment, Business & Money, Sport, Life & Style, Culture, Puzzles and Magazines. Within each vertical section, we built a secondary navigation to take you deeper — i.e. “Tennis” within “Sport” — a prelude to personalisation through the ability to “follow” a topic or author. We rebuilt the puzzles and games experience, enabling the 140,000 subscribers who play regularly to easily find all games from the past seven days — a key customer demand — while organising them into customer-friendly categories ranging from Crossword to Sudoku with difficulty levels — from easy to medium to fiendishly hard — making it easier for new players to find their level. The final element of the app redesign was enhancing the presence of visual journalism — video, photography and graphics. This was crucial during the US elections, when on the days of electoral results 383k readers used our new full-screen data graphics to get real-time updates on voting. Our engagement metrics show that the new Live App strategy is working. The number of subscribers using the app has increased by 29% from a year earlier, to 273,00 a day. Live App engagement has significantly strengthened: Times Live app subscribers are visiting an average of 35 times in a month, a 17% increase from a year earlier. The majority of daily Live App readers are visiting multiple times during the day, with time spent for each visit rising to a record high of more than 13 minutes.