The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is recognized today as a publisher with a strict paywall and a leader in the subscription revenue model. In order to achieve this, WSJ realized they needed to do more than simply offer content; they needed to position themselves as a service. Since then it has invested in building an in-house development and design divisions collaborating in different teams working closely with editorial and executives. WSJ is focused on building personalized tools for their customers while improving their editorial storytelling capabilities to provide powerful services for paying customers and impactful journalism for everyone.
I worked with WSJ on key projects to help realize this vision. The projects I led focused on three themes:
- User Research: Establishing an on-going system to inform WSJ about how people use their site.
- Personalization Tools: Strategizing and designing personalized subscriber-only products.
- Editorial Capabilities: Defining products like “5 things” and an event-centric responsive template perfect for fast-paced events like the Olympics and the World Cup. Our goal was to improve the way that the editorial team tells stories and publishes special event coverage online.
User Research
WSJ went through a major redesign in 2007 led by a consulting firm. The consulting firm took several months for user research and to define personas, a research tool to help build empathy towards the visitors to websites. It was a lengthy, painful process that left internal teams with biases against the user experience (UX) design process. By the end, “User research” and “personas” had become forbidden words in strategy meetings.
The Director of UX brought me on board with the goal of changing the team’s perception. With her support I introduced two projects: User Fridays, a concept to which I was introduced at the Agile UX Conference, and Proto-personas.
During User Fridays, users would visit the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where we offered them lunch and interviewed them for about an hour. The goal was to introduce the concept of research as a low-effort and valuable resource for each product development team. What started with friends and family as participants then moved to subscribers and pretty soon I was struggling to schedule all the requests from other teams that wanted to participate in the User Friday Session. When this happened I created a kit for every team to be able to organize their own User Friday sessions.
During a brainstorming meeting we found ourselves struggling to find language to talk about our users. That is when I brought in Jeff proto-personas workshop to help facilitate and change the perception of WSJ website users from individuals to personas. Soon enough, proto-personas went from a dirty word to a helpful concept that was integral to many brainstorming meetings.
Results:
- More than 30 User Fridays were organized.
- User Fridays Research Kits were used for teams including Factiva, Barron’s and MarketWatch.
- A brainstorm kit was developed that included proto-personas workshop.
Personalization Tools
As part of the development team, User Experience got unique opportunities to define personalized products for WSJ subscribers. I led three projects:
My News
A news reader that gives you the latest news tailored to you based on companies in your portfolio and on your watch list
Profile
A home for conversations among those in the financial industry adding a social layer to the WSJ reader community
Results:
- Briefcase and Profile were featured as key reasons to invest in Newscorp (see the press release and Los Angeles Times article).
- My News became a major tool for WSJ’s subscribers specially among amateur investors. Due to its popularity, My News was re-skinned and repurposed for Barrons and Marketwatch.
Editorial Capabilities
WSJ invested in services for subscribers, but they also needed a strategy to reach new audiences and promote their open-access content. A trend of creating long-form journalistic content was starting but the content management system and product team took many hours to develop and design these stories and the editorial workflow was painful. Under the leadership of Erin Sparling and Tracy Corrigan, we formed a four-person editorial capabilities team tasked with building tools for editors.
Results:
- Created a responsive template for long-term events used for The Winter Olympics and the World Cup coverage.
- Developed a template for snackable content also known as “5 things” that is used for about ten stories per day. We took one month to develop this crucial template, compared to the 7 months it would’ve taken the product team.
- Developed a navigation system for long-form stories used by more than twenty articles.
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