Yang 2020 campaign site
Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign website was a primary destination for voters encountering the candidate for the first time. But for many traditional voters, the homepage introduced an unfamiliar politician through a radical-sounding policy: universal basic income.
As design lead for the campaign, I led the redesign of Andrew Yang’s campaign website across desktop and mobile. My work focused on translating voter research about their perceptions of Yang into an experience that introduced him more effectively, while still supporting the campaign’s needs around donations and email acquisition.
This case study focuses on a central shift in strategy: before asking voters to understand Yang’s policies, the campaign homepage needed to give them a reason to trust the candidate behind them.
THE challenge
The existing homepage assumed that visitors were already supportive enough of Andrew Yang to learn about his policies, donate, or join the campaign.
For many voters, that wasn’t the case.
Independent research in Iowa and New Hampshire showed that many registered Democrats were unfamiliar with Yang. Even among those who recognized his name, awareness of the details behind his signature Freedom Dividend proposal was limited. Among centrist and right-leaning participants, universal basic income could be perceived as an extreme form of socialism.
More importantly, testing showed a difference in how voters responded to the campaign’s messaging. Ads that were centered entirely on the Freedom Dividend were received negatively, while messaging that presented Yang as a family man and political outsider resonated much more strongly.
That revealed a strategic problem: the campaign was trying to make the case for Yang in the wrong order.
Design strategy
An audit of Yang’s existing landing page reinforced that notion, and yielded other problems.
Yang was shown as one person within a crowd rather than as the focus of the page. Calls to donate or provide an email address appeared repeatedly without much context for why a new visitor should engage. And, overall, the page lacked any visual hierarchy to guide someone encountering the candidate for the first time.
The original homepage design for the Yang 2020 campaign.
Voter research suggested that explaining Yang’s unconventional policies should not be the primary concern, and an effective introduction first needed to establish who he was.
I reframed the homepage redesign around several priorities:
Introduce Yang as a relatable person—husband, father, entrepreneur, and political outsider—before asking visitors to evaluate unfamiliar policies.
Place donation and email-signup requests within contexts that gave visitors a clearer reason to engage.
Improve readability and accessibility, particularly for the older voting demographics the campaign needed to reach.
With more than 70% of site traffic coming from mobile devices, I approached the redesign as a mobile-first experience while establishing a hierarchy that could scale comfortably to larger screens.
Balancing priorities
The campaign also had aggressive conversion requirements.
Visitors were expected to encounter opportunities to donate or sign up near the beginning, middle, and end of the homepage. Even first-time visitors saw a donation prompt before reaching the primary homepage content, while the hero itself included another email signup form.
Removing those requests wasn’t an option.
Instead, I focused on giving them stronger context.
Rather than presenting calls to action as isolated requests, I paired them with simple value propositions and placed them within a broader narrative about the candidate. My goal was to preserve the campaign’s acquisition strategy without allowing conversion prompts to overwhelm a visitor who was still deciding whether Yang was someone worth supporting.
Redesigned nudges to donate or sign up, with added value prop.
Introducing the candidate
Voter research also influenced the imagery and messaging throughout the redesigned homepage.
Instead of leading primarily with Yang’s policy platform, I used different sections of the page to present him as a family man, a patriotic leader, and a down-to-earth political outsider.
This gave visitors more familiar reference points before introducing proposals like the Freedom Dividend.
The content hierarchy followed the same principle: establish the candidate and his values first, then give visitors a clearer path into the policies and ideas behind the campaign.
Mobile screens showing the new content hierarchy.
The resulting experience
The redesigned homepage created a more deliberate progression from introduction to understanding to engagement.
The biggest change: No mention of the Freedom Dividend until users drilled into Yang’s policies.
New visitors encountered a clearer picture of who Andrew Yang was before being asked to understand his more controversial positions. Campaign calls to action remained prominent, but were integrated into that narrative rather than functioning as disconnected requests.
Following the redesign, donation click-throughs and merchandise sales increased and remained above their previous levels week over week. Most notably, the average rate of email signups doubled compared with the previous homepage.
The redesign showed that the campaign did not need to choose between introducing the candidate effectively and meeting its acquisition goals. By changing the order in which the story was told, Andrew Yang’s campaign website could support both.
The redesigned experience on desktop.