A curated living-room video experience for the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal’s daily video content brings its journalism to life with engaging explainers, informative news content, and in-depth investigations.

Our Apple TV app was in need of a refresh, so over the Summer of 2019 we re-built it from the ground up to take advantage of the immersive touch-based navigation of the latest Apple TV hardware and to focus the interface on easier discovery of our excellent video journalism.

The Wall Street Journal Apple TV search screen.
The Wall Street Journal Apple TV home screen showing featured videos.
The Wall Street Journal Apple TV series screen showing video series titles, poster art, and a short description.

Content organization and user flow

Working with our UX research and video teams, we mapped out the navigation, content organization, and user flow, with a focus on following the native tvOS conventions as much as possible.

"No one wants to learn how to use your app" was a guiding principle in this stage. We kept the navigation simple, with the latest videos prominently featured when the app launches, and more granular categorization just below.

UX wireframes by Maria Jessica.

Our long-form video series are separated onto their own page, where they could have a full browsing experience without overloading the home screen. Popular series are included in one row of the home screen to interest viewers who may not have checked out that content before.


The visual layer

The new Apple TV app features a completely redesigned user interface that marries The Wall Street Journal’s typography and colors with tvOS-native, immersive elements that are instantly familiar to users.

Video titles were a central challenge to creating an app that felt like it belonged alongside the native apps on tvOS. Apple’s suggested interface styles assume that the cover art for TV series and movies will feature the title within the image. For The Wall Street Journal’s videos, the title is often a full headline, and the image more complex, to convey the full context of the story.

A mockup of the app's home screen showing large video tiles laid out horizontally along the top with the headline \'Today\'s News\' and an option to play all the videos.
A mockup showing a full-screen thumbnail with overlaid headline and description.
A mockup showing large thumbnails taking up the top two-thirds of the screen with headlines overlaid.
A mockup showing a vertically-scrolling interface with the thumbnail full-screen behind the headlines.
Explorations of the home screen design.

We explored many different card options to find a visual solution to displaying titles along with video thumbnails in a way that felt natural on tvOS, without creating an overwhelming amount of on-screen text.

These explorations also helped us find the right balance between using the tvOS-native typography and colors and using WSJ’s brand colors and typefaces. Using WSJ’s headline font, Escrow, for the video titles lent the interface an unmistakable WSJ “look,” allowing us to use Apple’s excellent San Francisco font for all smaller labels and descriptions.

The first mockup showing translucent gray video thumbnail tiles with a larger, less translucent focused state.
A later mockup showing transparent video thumbnail tiles with a larger, white focused state.
A later mockup showing the same tiles with WSJ's Escrow typeface.
A later mockup keeping the Escrow typeface but changing to a transparent focused state.
A later mockup adding a translucent background to the focused state.
A later mockup adding a light translucent background to the non-focused states.
Select explorations of the thumbnail design.

Using San Francisco wherever possible enabled us to take advantage of the many custom behaviors that Apple has baked into the font, such as weight variation and spacing optimizations at smaller sizes.

Upon launching the app, the home screen displays featured videos in large cards right at the top of the screen, inviting the viewer to start watching right away. Below, custom lineups of videos on various topics invite a deeper look into our extensive video content. Every card reacts to the touch remote in 3D, bringing the content to life.

The Wall Street Journal Apple TV home screen before the update - a boring uniform grid of video thumbnails.
The new Wall Street Journal Apple TV home screen showing a varied screen of large featured videos, smaller playlists, and video series thumbnails.
The app’s home screen, before and after the redesign.

Upgraded poster art

In addition to upgrades to our daily news videos, we included a new dedicated section highlighting our video series, with custom poster and backdrop artwork for each. Design guidelines for the artwork ensure every video series looks like it belongs to the same family, while still expressing the series’ individual personality.

Select new artwork for The Wall Street Journal’s video series.

Reception and results

The new app launched in August 2019 and was well-received by Apple, and was featured on the front page of the App Store. The app has also received many positive reviews from users and great internal feedback at WSJ.

The WSJ app featured on the tvOS App Store with a large banner placement.
Promotion in the App Store

I took on this project as Product Designer on the Audio/Video team at the Wall Street Journal. The app was designed and developed along with Marta Jakubanis, Tim Schmidt, Dave Tinnes, and Thomas Williams.

A version of this case study was originally posted on the WSJ Design website.