Beyond I Do

ADCOUNCIL x CP+B

A candidly informative site that highlights ongoing discrimination against LGBTQ+ couples and families through personal stories and an interactive map. 

The campaign highlighted ongoing injustices to LGBTQ+ families in 31 states, even though couples can marry in all 50.Our goal was to create a digital experience for “Beyond I Do” that shifted perception among “the Moveable Middle” - Americans who may not be explicitly pro-LGBTQ+, but believe that all Americans deserve equal treatment under the law. 

We needed to turn dense legal jargon into quick, digestible bites that anybody could understand, and do justice to the stories people shared through our UX and design choices.

We had to strike just the right tone in both our UX patterns and visual design. The site couldn’t feel too flashy or too staid. We also needed to balance the desire for heavier functionality, like an interactive map, with the need to create a highly performant experience on mobile.

To kick off, the UX team brainstormed three distinct UX directions, each with a unique strategy to engage the “Moveable Middle” through design and content strategy.

We considered, for instance, how our audience would respond to a homepage with just three highlighted stories versus an interactive map of America, and what modules were essential for story pages. We then dove into all the factors that would affect the site’s usability and design in a workshop with our clients, which I led.

The workshop included our fully fleshed-out wireframes and explorations of color, typography, statistics, and icons. Since one of our core goals was to simplify complex legal information for average Americans, these visual elements were key to our overall creative strategy. We ultimately landed on a site flow that centered around an interactive map so that users could easily locate their home states, while making articles feel trustworthy and approachable though a clean design with a custom icon system.

After honing our initial UX directions, we considered the details, like how to integrate tooltips into articles to explain terms like “transgender” and how to expand and contract the full list of discriminatory legislation in every state so that it would inform, but not overwhelm, our target users.

Over the next two months, the team then finished and polished our designs, building an immersive, content-rich site that performed well on mobile despite major challenges, like translating an interactive map into a user-friendly list.

When it launched, the site performed beyond our initial benchmarks and more importantly brought to light these continued injustices in a digestible, actionable way. The “Beyond I Do” campaign garnered national attention and was featured on major news outlets like Good Morning America and ABC News, as well as industry publications like Site Inspire and The Drum.