TPT
REDESIGNING A LEADING PENSION company’s online PORTAL
TPT are one of the UK’s leading providers of workplace pensions, with over 75 years of expertise.
Their customers manage their pensions via an online portal, but in its current state, this is a process filled with long forms, tick boxes, and input fields. A far from intuitive experience.
I was brought into the Landscape UK team to help rejuvenate TPT’s online portal. Sitting alongside another UX designer, and a team of 3 UI designers, we worked in sprints to keep the project moving at an accelerated rate, ensuring rapid hand-offs from UX, to UI, and into an external Dev team.
Whether it was reviewing UI designs to ensure every detail of UX was captured, briefing in developers on the ‘behind the scenes’ complexities of the interfaces, or maintaining strong relationships with the client so that we could capture the intricacies of this sector, good communication was absolutely essential throughout this whole project.
The project was broken into epics, with me handling navigation, the account & personal details section, pension guidance, how a user makes contributions to their pension, how they manage their retirement funds, and finally, how a user retires within the portal.
Account & personal details was the first epic I worked on, and although it appeared simple at first, I quickly realised how intricate a task we had ahead of us, to redesign and entire portal. Alongside the client I had to work out how any change made in the personal details section, like date of birth, could then impact the rest of the portal, and what to do if it did.
This would be a theme that ran throughout the entire project. Work on a section, begin implementing best practices, analyse its impact across the rest of the portal, then amend or repeat depending on the outcome. It was this level of attention to detail and eagerness to understand this platform as a whole that I believe allowed me to make a big impact on the project from early on.
The most complicated epics, by far, were how a user makes contributions to their pension, and how they manage their retirement funds. These sections required me to design intuitive interfaces for incredibly complicated scenarios where users could be managing several different retirement pots, all with different statuses. The crux of these pages was that I wanted everything to be as visible as possible. It should be clear to the user what they can or can’t update within their pension scheme, with each change or update they make clearly displayed and played back to them.
To solve the crux, I looked at implementing simplistic and easy to use control methods like large buttons and sliders. The key to these new interfaces working was to always show the user what was happening to their pots in real time, meaning they didn’t have to keep numbers in their head and could simply focus on creating the retirement fund that was right for them. For example, in this screen the user is choosing the funds they would like to invest their money into when they retire. Adjusting the sliders in each card would update the values above, and the pie chart in the top right, ensuring the user was always aware of exactly what will happen to their money when they retire and what that means for their monthly retirement income.
As well as simplified controls and live views of their funds, I ensured full summaries of changes were always shown to users before any actions were confirmed, giving them a final chance to review and understand any changes that were about to be made.
This approach to managing retirement funds gained a lot of excitement and support from the client, and is a solution to some very complex problems that I believe is a massive quality of life improvement for those that use TPTs portal.
Overall, I am incredibly proud of the work I did during this project. We worked to tight deadlines but produced excellent work throughout. The client were fantastic to collaborate with and I enjoyed an excellent relationship with them throughout.
Finding the delicate balance between an enjoyable experience on screen, and an experience that the client is happy with from a personal and legal perspective was a constant source of satisfaction for me. I learnt a lot during this project, not only about pensions, but about how these industries can provide incredibly complex and rewarding problems to solve for a UX designer, and I look forward to coming face to face with plenty more of these kinds of problems.
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