Re-designing a pensions management portal for 350,000 members and £34 Billion in assets.

Railpen are responsible for the safekeeping and investment of around £34 billion in assets for the 350,000 members of the railways pension schemes. They're one of the UK's largest and longest established pension funds, founded in 1965 .

They were in the process of updating their legacy systems with Tata consultancy due to longstanding issues and complaints from members.

Railpen's client base is formed of the large and strongly unionised UK rail industry, bringing additional pressure to the project.

• Axure for wireframing and prototyping

• Whiteboard and sketching

I was the Lead UX Designer for Answer Digital working closely with the client and internal project team.

This project required me to complete initial research in to the Railpen users, to understand specifically their pain points with the online portal.

I also reviewed in meticulous detail the current offering and key journeys for users. I would wokr closely with our development and test team to examine where and how we could improve the journey for users.

I would then propose solutions to Railpen to explain how we would make improvements and why in order to satisfy user pains and turn the tide of the growing discontent from their members.

Answer Digital had worked with Railpen previously and were brought in based on reputation to look at the front-end design of their online pensions portal.

It was currently being handled by Tata consultancy, who were also implementing back-end systems enhancements.

The clients legacy systems were hugely long-winded and caused problems for their customers wanting to up date their pensions information, which in turn was having a damaging impact on the business and reputation. 

Unfortunately there was no progress being made to what members were seeing to the portal as previous paper forms seemed to have been copied over with little though as can be seen in the images below.

Firstly, we wanted to know as much as we could about the users of their systems. As the project was very short-term, we conducted several telephone interview with users to uncover their key challenges, spoke with SMEs and also used previous discovery work from Tata.

The user research told us how complex, long and arduous some of the in-putting was to their systems.

With each iteration of the system from Tata, the design was staying almost identical with only small visual changes, but no improvements to its usability.

As a first step, we printed out all the journeys, starting with the most critical and reviewed them as a design and development team. 

We went through to see where the issues might be before asking ourselves ‘How might we’ look to provide a solution for each of these issues both separately and holistically?

Being able to view the problem all laid out allowed us to to take a step back and understand how we might be able to tackle such a long-winded journey as well as seeing the issues end to end. 

Amongst others, one of the key journeys that users were completing which was causing issues due to its length (16 pages in total!) was the ‘salary process’, where Railpen customers could up date their salary contribution as needed. An essential part of any pension service.

The journey was long, jargon heavy and not a good experience for users for something which was crucial to their future finances and therefore made customers nervous using the product. 

It felt like it had been lifted straight from text form to the computer, without any real consideration for how it could be best simplified for the user.

What’s worse, users would have to go back through multiple pages if they had realised they had made a mistake before the final submission.

Overall the experience was poor to say the least , but  felt as though this didn’t require a huge facelift or reconstruction to improve it, just a little left-field thinking.

To improve the process, we needed to ensure we captured all the requirements of the 16-page process in to our proposed solution.

I considered various ways to display the information, each discussed and verified with the developers and product owner for time and feasibility, before deciding on a 3-step process which would incorporate a real-time editable table shown to the user which would reduce the need for many of the previous steps.

We also incorporated real-time feedback to the user such as errors and success for the editable fields if values or rules were exceeded or broken.

A much clearer progress bar was added in to give feedback to the users as well as a mild change to the visual design to bring it up to date.

Finally, we ensured that the content and iterations of the designs were validated through testing with users.

The client and importantly our users were delighted with the updates. They were able to make changes to their pension information with little effort and confidence in the system they were using. 

• Reduced steps down from 16 to 3 by introducing a dynamic table

• Real time error and success messaging was used to give confidence to users interacting with the table

• Got rid of the previous steps in the journey which had been copied from a legacy paper format

• Introduced a progress indicator which gave reassurance to users in the journey

• Removed jargon and re-wrote in user-centred friendly language adding explanatory text were needed

• Used current styling re-imagined and re-designed, whilst keeping consistency with brand and customer expectations

Answer Digital was brought in on an initial 3 month contract to advise and work with the client. 

After helping them to reduce their user-journeys from an average of 16 steps down to 3 and simplifying the process, the contract was extended to 2 years to help Railpen through the development of their new system over the medium and long-term, taking over from Tata as the consultant of choice for the client.