Global Authentication Across New York Times Products
Creating a unified login and registration experience across the entire Times ecosystem: News, Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and beyond.
Timing
July 2019 – February 2020
Role
Product Designer, alongside add'l Product Designer
Team
Myself, Product manager, three engineers, Data Analyst, UX Researcher, Copy Writer, Marketer
Where We Started
Examples of the disjointed authentication experience in 2019.
The New York Times historically had custom authentication interfaces across its bundle, leading to inconsistent UI/UX, redundant development, and inefficient updates.
The form we started with. Credit: Bon Champion
Our team inherited an in-progress initiative to streamline consistency and reduce redundancy in login and registration.
With the foundation in place, we focused on modernizing the design, enhancing functionality, and supporting long-term adoption across teams.
The Opportunity
How might we make authentication seamless and universal across The New York Times product ecosystem?
What We Did
Standardized Visual Design
One of many multi-variate tests of button style, position, and stacking.
We explored several key hypotheses:
How might we guide users in a more helpful and focused way?
How might we make the “forgot password” journey more intuitive?
How might Google One-Tap help readers stay logged in?
How might visual design help readers authenticate more successfully?
How might we support readers struggling with their passwords?
These weren’t isolated tests—my PM and I built relationships across the organization to encourage teams to test and implement optimizations on their login forms.
After an accessibility audit, I redesigned all elements to meet WCAG 2.1 AA compliance.
I introduced subtle, quick animations for interactive component states (e.g., active, hover, press, release, disabled, processing) and implemented a skeleton loader for slow internet connections.
These changes improved both the user interface and adoption rates by giving teams more reasons to adopt our solution.
Testing out of an outdated confirmation page
The Social Sign-On flows were inconsistent and lacked cohesion. I tested, documented, and redesigned these flows to align with our unified visual approach.
Advancing Usability
Email-first redesign, simplifying decision-making with fluid interactions
Email-first specs for implementation
We introduced a new “Email First” interaction, challenging the assumption that more steps always equal more friction.
By spreading out decisions across multiple screens and ensuring smooth transitions, we significantly increased authentication rates.
Magic link flow, allowing users to log in without their password via email
User error accounted for 25% of failed authentications. By introducing a new way to log in after forgetting a password, we noticeably reduced error rates.
The Results
Adoption
Example of Unified Login customized and implemented across the bundle.
After years of work, we rolled out across News, Newsletters, Cooking, Wirecutter, Watching, Payment, iOS, and Account.
Since then, new teams have leveraged our work to further unify authentication across the organization.
Documentation
Recognizing the importance of maintaining consistency, I created clear guidance, design documentation, and processes to ensure these principles were applied across the user journey. This enabled both immediate and long-term consistency in the design system.
"
The documentation Riley built has become a longstanding source of truth for other designers across the org and has helped shape consistency.
Olivia Cheng, Core Platforms Design Lead
By the numbers
lift in login success rate
lift in logged-in users
of web clients migrated
Related awards
Publisher's Award: Business Winner, February 2020
Register With Google: For building a registration system that allows us to deepen our relationship with millions of readers who log in through Google.
The final UI. See live implementation
Closing Thoughts
We built a highly optimized, reusable, and global authentication client for the organization.
We strengthened The New York Times brand by visually and functionally unifying the Times suite of products.
We delivered a seamless, accessible experience that helped users create accounts and stay logged in, empowering them to better engage with our content.
Fully satisfied with our rollout and optimizations, we handed off the authentication experience to a new platform team for ongoing maintenance.
RS
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