Wrangling Medicare’s Complexity: How IA Brought Clarity to AARP’s Medicare Experience

Every day, 10,000 Americans turn 65 and face one of the most consequential—and confusing—decisions of their lives: choosing Medicare coverage. At AARP, we were inadvertently making this harder by maintaining five separate resources, each with its own navigation, content strategy, and design patterns.

This case study demonstrates how IA serves as the connective tissue between content strategy, user research, and data analysis to transform AARP’s fragmented Medicare ecosystem into a unified experience. I’ll share the real-world IA work that made this possible—from conducting a multi-resource content inventory, to designing and validating a three-tier taxonomy through iterative tree testing, to preparing content as the knowledge base for the organization’s first generative AI tool.