Custom Times (2009)

ROLE: Concept, Design, Development.
COLLABORATORS: Nick Bilton, Michael Young

Custom Times, one of several projects for which The New York Times was honored with the 2009 Knight-Batten Grand Prize for Innovation in Journalism, is a prototype developed in the R&D Lab to illustrate how a personalized version of The New York Times can seamlessly transition across multiple platforms: print, web, mobile, TV and more.

Increasingly, people are consuming news content on a wide variety of platforms, thus the goal of Custom Times is to provide a rich, engaging news reading (and watching) experience that anticipates the user's needs across devices and environments. Custom Times takes on many of the challenges that all media companies face in creating multi-platform products and services: designing consistent and appropriate user interfaces for a myriad of devices, delivering content that is appropriate for each device, and creating new, novel interactions that enable cross-device functionality.

Custom Times consists of an interactive newspaper box, a personalized website, a mobile website, a TV application and car integration.

Created by Alexis Lloyd, Ted Roden, Nick Bilton and Michael Young.