Context
The Wall Street Journal is a longstanding publication known for their financial reporting and authenticity. Their mobile app was originally designed as a digital version of the daily paper. However, as the company expanded its reporting to include multimedia and immersive storytelling, the app struggled to incorporate it. At the same time, consumer expectations have shifted toward more dynamic, personalized digital experiences.
Our team at IDEO was tasked with bringing the design of the journal’s mobile app up to par with the caliber of their reporting.
In other words: How might we design an audience-first digital experience that makes engaging with the depth and breadth of the Wall Street Journal not only essential — but irresistible?
Legacy designs of the iPhone app
Over the course of 9 months our team embedded ourselves within The Wall Street Journal offices collaborating alongside their design team, newsroom, and executive leadership. This enabled us to immerse ourselves in the needs of the journal and ensure that our work was not only transformative but also adapted to the realities of their product structure.
The first phase of work was centered around identifying key faults and potential unmet user needs in the current mobile app and generating provocative concepts. The second phase was focused on further developing those features, proving them out with both clients and users, and finally transforming the work into production-ready assets.
Process
I was brought onto this project because the team needed someone with serious sense-making and iterative design chops. My focus areas were:
Conducting qualitative user interviews and quantitative validation surveys of the app structure
Supporting the production of a new design language system complete with development ready components and documentation
Designing, prototyping, and developing media first experiences
Facilitating client critique sessions and coordinating design alignment across stakeholders
Evolving the app’s global navigation to prioritize user needs by making high demand features front and center, and moving infrequently accessed areas such as account settings into a secondary layout. This navigation re-design also built in structure to accommodate future features in a scaleable way, and can be seen below in this information architecture
Role
Outcomes
Our design work spanned nearly every portion of the app’s user experience.
Here are a few key elements:
An overhaul of the design of the news feed, creating consistent, flexible and modern layouts for breaking news, opinion pieces and exclusive coverage
An elevated article reading experience including a newly built out “read to me” audio-based method of listening to articles.
A new media space designed to surface and showcase the video reporting and podcasts regularly released by the journal
Conclusion
As we worked alongside The Wall Street Journal, building out relationships throughout the company, we learned that our work had aligned our stakeholders in a way never before seen within the company. As a result of this collaborative approach, we discovered portions of our work were already rolling out into production before the project even wrapped. This work is still ongoing with a final phase continuing through 2025.
“You guys have this incredible range. You can talk to CEOs, you can talk to college students and retirees, and connect with them. You understand what they're going through and what they're telling us, and ultimately what that means for the Wall Street Journal product experience.”
- Design Leadership
“It was clear you guys had a passion, and that you that you cared about our brand and doing right by us. I think there was a a real fear coming into this project that we could end up with something that was generic and could be anybody's app, but I think where we landed really feels like a like the best version of us.”
- Newsroom Leadership
