Dow Jones Article Redesign
Dow Jones is a global news and business information provider, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and MarketWatch. They wanted to reduce duplicate efforts by different brands redesigning different sections by creating a cross-brand design system and using it to redesign an article page to be used by all brands.
Project Overview
The project aimed to create an article experience that engages users, built on a sustainable framework that allows easy evolution and maintenance of articles while maximizing flexibility for supporting all content, generating revenue, and increasing membership.
My Role
As a consultant, I led the Discovery effort for multiple brands, utilizing my skills as a Product and User Experience Lead.
Brands in Scope
WSJ: Pro, CFO, CIO, WSJ Mag
Barron’s, Penta, Barron’s Advisor
Marketwatch
Mansion Global
Financial News London
Private Equity News
Discovery
User Research
For this project, we utilized a wide range of user research methodologies to gain a comprehensive understanding of our users and their needs. These included interviews, surveys, usability testing, A/B testing, field studies, and ethnographic research.
We also gathered quantitative data to gain insights into user behavior and preferences. This included website traffic data, conversion rate data, A/B testing data, user feedback data, and heat maps.
By combining these different methods, we gathered qualitative and quantitative data on our users' behaviors, attitudes, and preferences, which informed our design decisions and helped us to create a better user experience.
User Personas
Click Analysis Summary Example
MVP Concept
The top priority is to implement best practice components while creating new cross-brand design system.
Navigation headers stay the same and are not in scope for the redesign.
No functionality that requires changes to CMS/Tools.
UX Principles
Optimize existing functionality and UX patterns
Content forward
Streamline navigation & signage
Reduce cognitive load
Publishing flexibility
Success Metrics
Faster speed to market
More efficient to deploy
Increase capacity for future releases
Increase design system adoption by brands
Increase consistent UX patterns and article templates
User Metric Guardrails
Increase article views per UV
Increase article views per session
Increase page views per session
Increase article page CTR
Decrease bounce rate
Increase visits per month (active days)
Increase DUX score by 5%
Increase average task completion per brand by 5%
User Needs Summary
Business Goals Summary
Aligning Business Needs and User Goals
User Testing & Experiments
We ran multiple rounds of user testing on mockups and on prototypes. We also ran multiple live experiments on the live site on the old templates. Below is a sample of some of the results.
User Testing
Standard Article User Testing Example Takeaways
Immersive Article User Testing Example Takeaways
Utility Bar User Testing Example Takeaways
Experiments
We ran twelve experiments on the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s to test various new features and updates. Below are a few sample results.
