AARP Unified Experience Redesign

After many months of research, outside vendor Razorfish was brought on to research the digital wants and needs of the 50+ population. The goal of the unified user experience redesign was to transition up to 14 of AARP’s web properties into one experience. The collaboration with Razorfish led to a digital strategy road map and a few PSD deliverables for the look & feel of the new design. The internal design team was then tasked with delivering visual design comps for numerous internal stakeholders. In order to achieve this, I proposed that we move from Photoshop to Illustrator to streamline the process. Illustrator, at the time, had features (detailed below) available to us— that we did not have in Photoshop. After setting up a couple templates and giving a process demo to the team of eight designers we moved forward and were able to produce upwards of 100 design comps. 

The content grew from 5 channels to 13 through partnerships with Frommers, ADAM, Cookstr.com, Arkadium, Illumen, and Destination RX, Happy Neuron, Kiplingers Personal Finance, Newscom (AARP en Espanol), and Healthline. The work included support for migration of some 20,000 articles and expansion of content to over 50,000 pages in the CMS. By end of 2010 AARP.org’s 3 million unique monthly visitors increased to 5.8 million.

Total Visits
2010 goal – 139MM
2010 actual performance – 142MM
Exceeded dashboard goal by 2%
16% above 2009

Global Page views
2010 goal – 750MM
2010 actual performance – 817MM
Global pageviews ended the year 9% higher than projected
19% above 2009

New Registered Users
2010 goal – 589K
2010 actual performance – 824K new registered users
(40% above goal)
41% above 2009