E-Newsletter and Website Concepts

Roles: User Experience, Visual Design, Email Design

AARP / Shift7 Digital (formerly Siteworx)

AARP is always looking for new and interesting ways to appeal to their audience and connecting with those users who are right at the beginning of membership age are a tougher base to reach. The editorial team at AARP developed the idea to reach the 40-50 something women base by creating new, original content that appeals to those women with "The Girlfriend" newsletter. Stories, videos, and quizzes would be included in a weekly email newsletter delivered right to their inboxes, focusing on topics like health, relationship, money, work, and lifestyle.

Concept 1 - Big & Bold

Working with both the digital design team and the editorial design teams, as well as business stakeholders at AARP, I developed multiple concepts for what that e-newsletter and companion news site might look like.

While "The Girlfriend" has an established logo, I played around with the idea of turning the newsletter name into display art at the top of the web landing page. This concept prioritizes an introduction to what the newsletter is, and a prominent call to action for signing up. The rest of the page promotes the current week's stories and content.

A lot of the same elements designed for the landing page lended themselves nicely to the email newsletter format. The card designs for the content easily fell in two columns, with the main story going full width at the top. Besides the content, other calls to action were kept minimal.

Concept 2 - Fun, Bright, Playful

Concept 2 incorporated a lot of inspiration from concept 1, while taking it in a slightly different direction by focusing on bringing a lot more content to the top level of the landing page.

Components for trending topics, quizzes, and latest content feed horizontally across the top get a lot more of the content right on the landing page.

The email newsletter design followed the same strategy throughout the various concepts. The overall design system worked nicely in both formats, and including only the four most important stories of the week in each digest means the email length was user-friendly.

Concept 3 - Let's Get News-y

The last concept was created to bring a more traditional "news" site look and feel to the newsletter landing page and email newsletter. Most inspiration for this concept came from major news sites, like The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc. The idea was to stick closely to the grid, promote a lot of content, but also have enough components that allowed for imagery to take the stage.

At this point in the design process, The Girlfriend team was defining more of what their week-to-week content looked like. There was now a need to promote a "Real Talk" video series across all platforms, and the templates needed to provide components that could highlight these weekly guests well.

The newsletter subscription process was also explored a bit further during this concept. While concepts 1 and 2 relied on modal sign ups, concept 3 incorporated a sign up page that not only presented the form, but highlighted more site content across the bottom.

Concept 3 Join (left) and Confirmation (right) pages

After the sign up process, a fun confirmation splash screen takes over. I explored prototyping some micro animations to make the signup experience delightful and unique.