Case study: now:u for 6point6

Consultant for technology consultancy to lead design and deliver new pension online tool

End to end design of a pension finding and consolidation tool, setting this pension provider apart from its competitors reducing opt out, increasing fund transfers.

The challenge

With approximately 4 million members, this pension provider 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.

Objectives

Increase member retention - how could the opt out rate be reduced to help retain members
Increase the member engagement with pensions overall to encourage contributions
Encourage members to consolidate other smaller pension

Responsibilites

Team

The solution to the problem had already been confirmed, along with the timescale and budget. Resource for this project was extremely limited, therefore my role as product design lead encompassed not just end to end design but, strategy, setting objectives and direction for the product, as well as stakeholder and third party engagement. Fair to say this project was following more of a reverse double diamond model.

Product owner
Product design lead
Third party software supplier
Copywriter

Approach

Evaluate

Redefine product objectives

Redefine needs and objectives

Conducted an expert review of the product offering from the third party supplier. It fell short both from a feature perspective, but also from a general experience point of view, lacking confidence, trust and engagement

Both user needs and expectations needed to be clarified inline with the product objectives. There was a difference between what we believed to be expected and the techncial capabilities we were offered by the software provided.

There was resistance in going out and gaining insight from members at this point to qualify if the solution chosen was going to meet the objectives it was looking to achieve. To harness some evidence from members at this stage before progressing further could have been easily achieved.

Challenges

As a team we faced a number of challenges with this project. Most significantly:

Discovery time was too short, there was no evidence to say we were going to meet the objectives by the proposed solution
With no available data, and no permitted engagement with the end users, meant this was very much opinion based led
Lack of resource due to another major digital project running concurrently taking the focus of some key players
The software provided by the already selected third party supplier didn't quite match with business objectives, therefore more work was needed on all sides to define, design and deliver - causing increase in time spent and cost.
No direct contact permitted with developers

Solution

Prototyping

Transfer pots

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

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 no time had been permitted for the little touchs, the micro animations that would bring this to life and enhance the overall experience. A list of suggested animations was provided to the client for consideration.

Hypotheses

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 dashbaord 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.