Factiva is Dow Jones' legacy, flagship product of 20+ years, with a loyal customer base of power users, but the interface and user experience that has not been revised since the product's inception.
I was tasked with crafting a new product vision for Factiva. I immersed myself in existing customer intelligence and user interviews to uncover key insights, while conducting competitive analysis of consumer news sites and aggregators. These efforts informed a compelling redesign proposal that reimagined the Factiva experience.
Alongside this initial discovery work, I began developing an agnostic and responsive design system, intended to serve Dow Jones' suite of B2B products. The proposal generated strong interest from senior stakeholders, leading to a roadmap for injecting much-needed change across the platform ecosystem.
Faced with limited budget and development resources, the team narrowed the product vision to a reskin of existing functionality via a new homepage – featuring a recommendation engine, newsstand, and alerts. With ~10% of user activity concentrated on the homepage, this approach promised high impact with low risk. Partnering with a mid-weight UX designer, I led the end-to-end design process, including research, insight synthesis, information architecture, user flows, wireframes, and prototypes.
We prototyped the full homepage experience – from login through to settings, and conducted 10 external interviews along with two rounds of user testing via UserZoom. Insights led to a cleaner, more modern UI with improved hierarchy and reduced content density. However, a sudden leadership change paused further progress and implementation.
In early 2021, new leadership tasked us with reimagining Factiva with a focus on personalisation for generalist users. Over an intense three-month discovery phase, design and product explored features such as; AI summarisation, auto-translation, tagging, commenting, watchlists, and market data tools. I lead a team of three that delivered competitor analysis, user research insights, and wireframe prototypes that laid the foundation for a new Factiva experience.
With just five months to deliver an MVP and accompanying design system, timelines were tight and development resources limited – pushing new technologies and features to future releases. I led early exploration for the design system, collaborating with designers and product managers to shape user stories and facilitate foundational workshops. Together, we defined core design principles and visual guidelines, establishing a clear path toward delivery.
Using the established design principles and visual guidelines, I created alternative themes and layout options for senior stakeholders – demonstrating what best aligned with user expectations. This helped steer the visual direction toward a clean, distinctive, and intuitive interface.
I led a small design team through the complexities of a new design system, defining tokens and delivering over 50 components within a four-week period. Factiva reimagined launched to a pilot group in October 2021, with a broader rollout to 1,000+ customers planned for January 2022. Following a successful launch with positive user feedback, the product secured additional investment and the product continued refinements through to May 2023. Additionally, the design system was scoped for rollout across all Dow Jones B2B and B2C products, including The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.
