The Wall Street Journal
Lead Product Designer
2019-2022
As a lead product designer responsible for the WSJ homepage and section fronts, I had several opportunities to impact the readers' experience and maintain the brand look & feel across all digital products. Below are a few of the most relevant projects I have led.
WSJ Icons
Our digital products are constantly evolving and with many new and exciting initiatives, it can sometimes become challenging to remain consistent. With different teams, designers and stakeholders, keeping everything in sync and providing a consistent experience for our readers becomes increasingly important.
Unfortunately our previous icon set lacked cohesion and a consistent visual style. Each time we needed a new icon, it was created in isolation and didn’t take into consideration the entire family. The challenge was clear: we needed to develop a new icon system that was consistent and scalable. This meant not only redesigning our existing icon set, but creating sustainable guidelines (and constraints) for our designers to follow, ensuring all of our iconography is consistent, on brand and feels part of the same family.
WSJ Mobile App Redesign
The WSJ app is the second more used product after the mobile web. The app also provides users with enhanced features as a player to listen to the articles, bookmark articles, and more.
But the mobile app also requires a lot of maintenance and effort from designers and developers. Given that under the Dow Jones umbrella, there are other brands with similar issues (Barron's, MarketWatch, FN), the company has decided to build only one app that can host all the brands using theming and tokens.
This effort will likely take us about a year to be able to put the V1 into production. The screenshots below are the design of the first app we are redesigning, The Wall Street Journal mobile app
WSJ Home Page Refinement
The Wall Street Journal homepage is visited by around 60 million people every month. It's essential to maintain a clear hierarchy and contrast on the page at all times, to serve the user's needs but also the business goals. The balance between delivering important news and making the page reliable is key to the business's success.
It took us about nine months to finally refind several visual details that have been neglected for several years, but the result is clear, and the page got a tremendous visual lift that invites readers to explore and not get distracted with superfluous elements.
Part of the changes was swapping the serif for the summary text (Exchange) for a sans serif version (Retina). Also, we decided to eliminate the thumbnails pictures on the top sections since those pictures did not add much value to the headlines but added noise on the page. Another significant change was the increase in the paddings between story cards, which helped frame the stories and improve the scannability of the page.
Mobile Media Player
Problem Statement: in the WSJ app it’s not easy to engage with audio content. Digital news consumption is shifting more from just reading the content to also listening.
Strategic Alignment: Supports the objective of building a distinctive and premium world-class news experience that empowers WSJ members to stay up to date and make timely decisions in a fast-paced world.
Impact of the Problem: Media formats, especially audio content, are becoming more popular, especially on mobile, and users are expecting to be able to consume news content in different formats. Audio in particular, would allow our users to be able to multitask while still engaging with our news, and also improve the accessibility of our products.
WSJ Design System
The WSJ Design System is an ongoing project with several contributors. It took us about a year to formally put together a system that anybody on the team could use. We saw a significant increase in consistency since all the new and old designers started to take advantage of the Figma components. Currently we have a dedicated team focus on maintain the system up to date and 'healthy'
