AARP Medical Bankruptcy Campaign

My role

This was one of the first full website designs I did with the team at Primal Stare, working as an Interactive Art Director. I was responsible for the visual design of the video tiles and carousel motion, as well as complementary digital campaign pieces, like rich media banner ads with forms.

The problem

AARP launched a campaign to raise awareness about medical bankruptcy and needed a website to run alongside several other digital tactics and TV commercials. They wanted to utilize a series of testimonial-style videos with the ultimate goal of inspiring people to reach out to their representatives in Congress. Initially we had 10–12 videos they had filmed ahead of time, with the possibility of more content on the way, so scalability was a priority for this project. We also knew that these were just a few of hundreds of thousands of similar stories, so it was important to have a design that looked massive.

The solution

A fully scalable site design that was first based on one tile and expanded to fit as many stories as necessary. We decided early on that the grid would work really well for this because we could simulate scrolling through hundreds of stories while only showing 10–12 videos. First, the team laid out the grid with each story that we had, knowing that the final tile in the bottom right corner would be our form, and then developed one animation style to use for each tile reveal. The rest was a matter of creating a few different arrays for the videos themselves, the static frames, the text versions, and, for a final touch, the randomized numbers for each. Once we had a plan of attack, I spent most of my time developing the animation style of the counting numbers, video carousel, and custom video player controls that we used as the basis for each story.

At a glance

• 10–12 filmed stories presented as an array of thousands
• 1 tile design scalable to any size database

The impact

Our small team at Primal Stare were subcontractors for this job, so unfortunately for us, we weren't able to get performance data on this. It would have been great to know how many videos were watched and for how long, and how many form submissions the site had.

Project features

Lessons learned

I remember being amazed at the end of this because it seemed like we were able to work through this one so fast, but it was my first time really understanding how databases, code, and design worked together and how powerful that relationship is. Once I saw it in action, I was thinking about how we could have really had any number of videos or easily added more down the line. Once that structure was established, each tile really just boiled down to a static image, number, text layout and video, and because these layouts were the same, they could be added very quickly.