Lead the design of a zero to one digital pension service

CLIENT

Now Pensions (for 6point6 / Accenture)

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

ROLE

Lead product designer

Project background

Now Pensions, one of the UK's largest auto enrolment pension providers with approximately 2 million members, was facing a significant challenge.

A substantial number of members were opting out of pension contributions. The majority of members had multiple small-sized pots accumulated from short term roles.

Members were disengaged with pensions on the whole, and saw more value having the money in their pocket.

Problem

How might we help lower paid, transient members engage with pensions, so that they take an interest and are less likely to opt out

Key challenges

Lack of awareness of pensions or understanding

Cost of living crisis - Low disposable income means money in pocket right now has more relevance

Debt prioritisation

Smaller contributions regarded as insignificant or irrelevant especially for number of non-UK national workers in transient short term roles

Objectives

Reduce opt out from auto enrolment

Increase member engagement with pension accounts

Encourage pension pot consolidation

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

What I did

My task was to run with and lead the design of a new pension service from the ground up. Due to budget, my involvement would end with a brief overlap to ensure smooth handover to engineering.

Approach

Having been presented with the issue and the solution required my first challenge was to understand the third party software that was put forward to enable product development.

Technical assessment: worked closely with engineering to evaluate the proposed architecture and flows, highlighting friction points affecting user experience
UX review. Conducted a review of the proposed approach and determined it was incongruent with the project objectives
Competitor analysis. Review similar and related systems to benchmark features and expectations, and utilise familiar patterns
Journey map proposed technical solution to help identify problem areas and opportunities to align further to user needs and expectations, whilst addressing the core problem
Stakeholder alignment: Presented back findings to the leadership and secured additional time to pivot aspects of the technical and design approach
Collaborate: Worked closely with third party supplier to optimise journeys to deliver against objectives and user expectations
Design overhaul: Redesigned the user journeys to optimise experience, prototyping throughout to develop the MVP aligned with business goals
Defined visual design and contributed further to the design library
Defined approach to testing and validation of product.

Opt out rate from auto enrolment pensions

10.4%

Opt out rate increase in 2022

19.5%

6P6 Maps - Empathy map - 6P6 - Now pensions.jpg

Success measures

Decrease in the number of members opting out
Increase in pension awareness reflected by increase in member log on frequency
Increase in return rate from date of comms campaign
Significant completion rate in those building out a view of their pension landscape
Increase in the percentage of amount of money transferred from other pension pots

DEFINITION & STRATEGY

Strategic actions

Build understanding of pensions and their benefits - create a product where members can view and add their pensions
Encourage pension pot consolidation through straight forward transfers
Improve customer experience and align to expectations of market
Enable a find previous (lost) pension service
Drive behavioural change by tailored communications around their pensions and the status of them

IDEATION & DESIGN

Find adding pensions - flow-wires-early.jpg

Prototyping

Add pots

Option to add one or more pensions to the dashboard at the same tim
Option to add more thn one pension from the same provider
Option to add new privder when not availabel from the lsit
Add as much detail to each pension as known

Transfer pots

Enabled multiple transfer option to minimise efforts
Straight through transfer available for already verified pots
Optional checks available to ensure benefits or guarantees would not be lost if transferred
Notifications relayed to customer on progress - multi channel

Find a pension

option to find multiple pension pots from previous employment

OUTCOMES & VALIDATION

Solution

The final design introduced a new product to the workplace pension provider empowering members with:

The ability to add multiple previous pensions to a dashboard, creating a unified overview of their pension pots
Tools to identify and recover long-forgotten pensions
A simple and seamless way to transfer one or more pensions into their current plan

Outcome

Delivered an intuitive zero to one MVP delivering against member needs and business goals, defining the approach for how other pension providers would adopt the challenge themselves.

Following a soft launch, user testing would be undertaken to validate the assumptions and design solution, and collect quantititve metrics to identify further improvements.

Challenges

Insight gathering had been done prior to my start on this project. Further engagement with users was restricted until after MVP to validate the concept. As a result, early decisions were largely based on assumptions, expertise and experience rather than evidence.
Communication with the development team was limited mostly restricted to collaboration with the technical architect, making it harder to iterate quickly, resolve some uncertainties, and maintain design–build alignment throughout delivery.

Next steps

Clearly it was important to get this in front of members as soon as possible and start to get feedback and data.

However, before getting in front of members, there was a piece of work needed to increase the visual engagement. The interface at this stage was fairly basic and it was clear that quality engagement was needed from the outset. Time was needed that would bring this to life and enhance the overall experience, through small micro aniimations adding personality throughout. A list of suggested animations was provided to the client for consideration.

Reflections

From the feedback and data to be gathered from user testing, it should be clear to evaluate the following hypotheses.

Including the details of the pension performance as part of the consolidation and finding tool will harness greater confidence from the members and will therefore increase the number of pensions transferred

Allowing members to add mulitple pensions to the dashboard at the same time will demonstrate higher satisfaction from members resulting in a higher percentage of their pensions added to the dashboard on their first visit.

Moving the communication from email to SMS would result in a faster response from members and greater convergence of pension transfers

SIMON FORD