Real-Time

Real time

Dow Jones & Company

Dow Jones, publisher of the world’s most trusted business news stories in a variety of different media, set a goal to develop a new cloud based platform that would collate all their different data points under one umbrella. That platform was Real Time.

Along with the requirement to present all the most important breaking news stories, the platform would also need to pull information from a whole range of data points across the board from stock value of a particular asset to in-depth consensus forecasts.

KEY CHALLENGES

The key requirements for the new platform would be the ability to build and maintain your own dashboard, apply custom filters, create watchlists and track instant news stories from multiple sources.

As I’ll also show during this case study, we would also learn of another compelling feature which we would only be alerted to during the first round of user testing.

APPROACH

During our research phase, we were fortunate enough to be given access to the clients user base in order to get an insight as to what our key objectives for the project should be.

We conducted a round of user interviews and focus groups along with a competitor analysis of companies offering similar platforms in order to get an understanding of current trends and best practices.

After a round of wireframing, we felt that we were in a good place in terms of forming an approach. However, in order to validate our ideas we went back to the very people who would be using the tool, the customer.

In general, the feedback from our testing sessions were very positive with the majority of participants stating that the new features would be a big improvement on what they currently had.

However, the one test that stood out from the rest was where a participant expressed his desire to be able to share information with his colleagues and clients.

This was a great new insight for us. We immediately started to explore new ideas for how we might implement this into the new product.

Convincing the wider team and stakeholders to include this feature in our list of requirements was initially quite challenging but we were successful in the end due to the fact that we were able to show that there was a definite businesses case for including it. This was something that the user wanted and would make use of.

OUTCOME

The new platform resulted in a much higher level of revenue for the business.

The success of the new platform could be attributed to the overall UX improvements in general but a key factor was the new share functionality which gave clients the desire to not only buy subscriptions for themselves, but for their team members and colleagues also.

THANKS FOR READING!

If you would like to find out more about this project or just want to chat UX in general, I would love to hear from you.

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