How R&D worked with the newsroom at the WSJ

The Wall Street Journal’s R&D/Newsroom Tools Team partnered with the Strategy team and Markets editors to launch two initiatives focused on expanding and improving its audience’s experience, write Alyssa Zeisler and Krista Schmidt.

Zeisler and Schmidt write, “The Flexicle is an article inset that provides additional context and explains market terms and concepts in a user-activated drop-down. Our goal was not to become an educational reference library, but to reduce the barriers to engaging with our stories. We wanted to make our stories feel less intimidating to new readers, giving us the chance to reach a broader readership. One idea is to eventually use artificial intelligence to adapt the content in the flexicle to the individual reader based on their behavioral patterns.

“While we have published several articles with the Flexicle (here and here, for example), you’re unlikely to see the feature regularly used on our site for now given the complexity in implementing it across our multiple platforms. Nevertheless, prototyping and testing the Flexicle yielded important benefits:

We created a new feedback module to gauge audience reception (the thumbs up/thumbs down button) in experimental features, which is now being used for other novel story components.
We relied heavily on user testing and feedback throughout this process, which indicated an interest in this type of feature, so we are continuing to consider how we can best meet this user need.
We engaged with the tradeoff between fast experimentation and multiplatform support, and learned a lot about our expansive content ecosystem as a result. Our initial plan to test this on the web only had to be changed when we realized this creates complications for other downstream publishing platforms. Those lessons learned are now being applied to experimental features and our work on tailored experiences.
We collaborated across multiple teams: R&D, Innovation, Strategy, and News — itself a fruitful experience.”