Simplifying online pension simulations
UX Design | User Research



Developing from a pre-existing internal platform, I was asked to revisit the workflow currently in use to create pension simulations and simplifying it to its core elements, as well as revisiting its whole visual design, in order to thus make the whole process and the details of the pension calculus as understandable as possible to the final users - common citizens.
Services
UX design; Service design;
UI design
Client
Public Sector agency
Challenge
Tasked with the redesign of the pension simulation platform at hand, the first challenge I faced was basically designing for two different users at once.
On one side, there's the final user of the pension, a common citizen close to retirement. Having worked their whole life, citizens interacting with the service are more often than not looking forward to plunge into the next chapter of their life, but are unsure of when exactly this would happen and at which conditions, given the complexity of pension laws and their ever-changing policies.
Their primary goal is thus to combine their collected contributions in a way that allows them to retire as soon as possible, with the maximum projected income available.
On the other side, we have the actual user of the platform, the pension counsellor, who is an external to the Public Sector agency that administrates the platform but who nonetheless need to know their policies and workings inside out in order to best support the citizen in planning their retirement.
The other challenges regarded were of a much practical nature. As per previous arrangements with the client, the whole design phase was scheduled to last only 3 weeks in total, including the initial user research phase, which was severely complicated by the highly bureaucratic context of the agency and the limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.


Approach
Given the strict limitations faced, we quickly got into the thick of the matter by conducting a full-immersion shadowing session with a daily user of the current platform, allowing us to clearly map out the experience currently provided and to highlight the various pain points, extra steps and difficulties users and citizens now face with the tool.
What emerged from this picture was a system built entirely to satisfy technical and policy requirements, rather than answering to clear needs and wishes of its many users.
The obvious next step was thus to shift the gears in the opposite direction and put the users back into focus.
As the main concern for citizen is to have a clear projection of how much their future income might change with the changing of their retirement date - and thus the contributions collected - the platform should reflect that and make it the main focus. Once this main pillar was established, it was followed by the restructuring of the whole user journey, by heavily cutting out all extra steps and details that didn't really have an impact on the result of the simulation itself.
Pensions are a complex matter though, and not all citizens have similar and simple experiences during their working life.
It follows that some citizens' situations might be more difficult to define and could therefore require more steps than average to develop a realistic assessment of their pensions. We therefore proceeded to clusterise the different citizens with the help of pensions experts and were thus able to divide them into three macro clusters - simple, medium and hard cases - each requiring a base set of simulation steps, to which supplementary ones could be modularly added.