Helping 1.5m customers navigate pensions and investments

Background

Smart Pension is a service application that helps users manage their pension savings during their working years.

A mix of offline and online workflows made processes time-consuming, and the big decisions even more daunting.

Challenge

Lead the content strategy for the product redesign, creating compliant and conditional user journeys and interactions.

CLIENT

Smart Pension

INDUSTRY

Financial services

TEAM

Product, Engineering, UX Design, UI Design, UX Research, Legal, Compliance

Outcomes

✅ 70% faster processing times through consolidated and simplified flows

✅ Reduced customer service dependencies

✅ Increased user comprehension and confidence in testing

✅ Delivered regulatory and policy-compliant journeys

✅ Established content patterns used across services and teams

Understanding our customers

Smart Pension is a corporate provider, so employees automatically become our service users.

This makes it even more important that we understand what they expect, need, and find painful in managing their pension when making decisions about their money.

I partnered with researchers to:

  • Interview users
  • Align research findings with gaps in our knowledge base
  • Map policy and competitor needs and constraints.

Bringing teams together

We had insights, but our:

  • Compliance team saw the risk of semantic drift
  • Engineering team saw scope creep
  • Designers saw compromises in experiences.

I brought everyone together to design around "how might we" questions.

We used this sprint to align our priorities, put plain language to work, explore simple patterns, and shift from gatekeepers to collaborators.

Designing user flows to solve edge cases

With the team on the same page, I worked with UX Designers to:

  • Align our requirements with key improvements
  • Define our architecture and journeys
  • Analyse potential edge cases
  • Consider our organising principles and patterns.

Making plain language and numbers a product strategy

Pensions are full of complex subjects.

I worked with compliance and legal SMEs to turn big ideas into simple steps.

I used flows to unpack how subjects and terms would be presented to the user. This became a practical way to contextualise our taxonomy.  

This was especially important when explaining complex concepts, like pension contributions, tax benefits, and tax relief.

While I inherited a style and tone, these sessions helped refine language and agree on our preferred terms.

Designing operations and service infrastructure

The redesign revealed we were outgrowing our design system and we had to make ambitious requirements incremental and manageable.

As the Content Design and UXOps Lead, I led the working group to:

  • Simplify how we manage Figma flows and handover
  • Design compliance reviews and versioning
  • Triage and iterate with product and engineering.

How I made an impact

Using progression to empower customers

Our research showed that user's wanted to feel in control of each step, moving from learning to decision-making with confidence.

I designed flows to progressively unpack concepts by:

  • Defining user needs and jobs
  • Leading with actions at every step
  • Structuring a visual hierarchy around comprehension goals
  • Introducing plain language and numbers from titles to microcopy.
Portfolio - RO-take-your-savings (1)

Patterns that scale across services

Our new operations helped us to support a backlog of incoming services.

I used our new operations playbook to support design crits, onboard squads, and document learnings in reusable guidance.

Why it matters

By collaborating with product, engineering, and compliance, I helped 1.5m customers make complex pension investment decisions.

From choosing contribution levels to understanding investment risk and returns, this work empowered customers to take action in confidence.

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