WSJ.com redesign coming later this month

The Wall Street Journal will introduce the first major redesign of its website since 2008 later this month, reports Joe Pompeo of Capital New York.

Pompeo writes, “In a Friday interview at the Journal‘s midtown offices, product chief Edward Roussel acknowledged that the process has taken longer than employees were initially led to believe. He said that re-engineering a website to be fully responsive turned out to be more complex and time-consuming than expected and that, from a business standpoint, ‘we felt it would be wrong to launch a website that didn’t incorporate the latest trends’ in digital advertising.

“There have also been complaints within the Journal over the execution of some of its digital products, like the Journal‘s iPad app, which relaunched in September. There have been issues with load time and ad functionality, and some insiders have scoffed at the design, which mirrors the layout of the daily print edition while offering a less prominent option for the latest continuous news updates.

“Roussel said data from the app’s previous iteration showed that the daily newspaper accounted for 75 percent of usage and that speed had stabilized, with a ‘significant’ load-time improvement due in May. As for the Apple Watch app, he said, ‘We’ve worked hard on the performance … and we think we’ve taken all the steps to ensure it’s a great experience.'”

Read more here.