Elevating Financial Wellness
Standard Life
2023
Product Design
The challenge
Standard Life sought to elevate financial wellness and guidance from a disconnected, static experience to one that is human-centred and personalised. I led the design process to enable that vision.
My Role
As a Senior UX Designer, I collaborated closely with a product squad throughout the project lifecycle. Over three months, I worked with the Product Owner during the discovery, ideation, and design phases. I partnered with the development team to review the UAT environment and review the UI components.
Impact
61% Increase in Engagement: Monthly page views rose from 25k to 47k after launch.
Exceeding Business Goals: The redesigned section exceeded the 12-month target of 200k page views, achieving 570k projected views.
This project not only improved user engagement but also aligned closely with Standard Life’s business objectives of promoting financial wellness.
Understanding the problem
The current guidance and tools were static and not relevant for every customer in the dashboard. For example, a 30yrs old customer with a personal pension could read about death benefits or how they can take their money. This information is not relevant to their age and product type.
The business had also a vision to expand the guidance in the dashboard and help people improve their financial wellness.
Defining customer segments
From previous research, the customer segments in the secure dashboard were well defined:
Starting out (18-35 years old)
Growth (35-50 years old)
Preparing for retirement (50-67 years old)
Accessing pension funds (55+ years old)
Interesting fact Customer segments are not defined only by age as it’s based on each individual’s life stage. Some people might access their pension at 55 years old, while others might still work full or part-time and access their pension later on.
Auditing existing guidance
I worked closely with a Product Owner and an Analyst to review the existing guidance in the customer dashboard. I used a user story mapping method to map out the existing journey. I reviewed the analytics of each page to find out which are the top visited guides and how people navigate.
Creating design hypotheses
We believe that people are looking for financial guidance online based on their priorities
So if we provide them with personalised guidance in the dashboard
Then we’ll see increased engagement with our guides, tools and pension payments
Designing a personalised financial wellness
The research proved that people look online for guidance based on their financial priorities. The customer data in the dashboard could help us design a personalised experience for each customer based on their plan details and activity in the dashboard.
Personalisation: Deliver content and functionality that matches specific user needs or interests, with no effort from the targeted users
Customisation: Enable users to customize or make changes to the experience to meet their specific needs by configuring layout or content.
Mapping guides and tools to each customer segment
I run a workshop with stakeholders to map guides and tools against each customer segment. The main characteristics of each segment were age, financial goals, life stage and whether they access pension funds.
To define the above we used evidence from qualitative research that was conducted early in the process.
