AARP Digital Design System

AARP, a membership organization for Americans 50+, was driving millions of visits to its digital properties daily with a successful search strategy, wildly popular games, and fresh content updates.
Traffic was high. But, user satisfaction and memberships sales were low, especially with the GenX set currently hitting 50.

In discovery, I distilled three strategic opportunities for the AARP.org redesign, along with tactical design directives.

Spreadsheets, not just for numbers. I mapped page components and component elements in one giant, source-of-truth spreadsheet for the design and dev teams.

My Role

Each discipline on the multi-disciplinary team brought findings from their own perspective, as I pored over engagement analytics and audited 1,000+ pages across AARP’s digital ecosystem. Then, I led synthesis of the finding, distilling the effort down to three big challenges opportunities…

Prioritize and differentiate content with new templates and components in a comprehensive digital design system
Strengthen connections and impact through the dynamic publishing capabilities baked into their Adobe Experience Manager CMS and other enterprise-grade tools
Champion quality and consistency by giving authors content-driven choices and enhance governance to foster consistency.

From wireframes to hand-off of the final design specs, I led content strategy and design across all three of the project’s tracks…

Information Architecture: The structure of AARP’s digital ecosystem looked eerily like their internal org chart. I tore down content silos to re-structure content around user needs and search topics.
Content Templates & Components: The site started with just two templates and hundreds of components. I partnered with UX to apply atomic design across 28 purpose-driven page templates built with a streamlined set of content components.
Digital Design System: I collaborated with visual design to articulate a set of digital product design principles and write comprehensive guidance for the new design system.

The Result

The refreshed site not only makes conversion and publishing more efficient, it helps make AARP relevant to a new, digital-first generation of members.

My Process: From User Needs to UX Copy

Structuring pages around user priorities

For each template, I started with a high-level outline prioritizing content by user needs. These page prioritization maps show how lifestyle content (travel, fashion) would be prioritized by timeliness, while problem-oriented topics (retirement, nutrition) lead with the most actionable content, often evergreen how-to’s.

Capturing Content Intent (and specs)

I detailed each content element in the annotated wireframes, including guidance for content creators, content intent, and character counts. While my counterpart in UX developed detailed wireframes and functional annotations.

Bringing the Experience to Life

Finally, I wrote sample copy for each page and partnered with visual design to bring it to life.