Penfold Pensions -
My Pension Goals
Role: Senior UX/UI Designer | Stakeholders: Lead Product Manager, Senior FE Devs
Method: Agile, Lean UX | Principles: User-centered Design, Material Design | Tools: Figma
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Overview
Penfold is a "Digital, flexible and online pension for everybody - job hoppers, self-employed, side-hustlers - everyone!". It has no minimum initial investment amount, flexible contributions and a free pension consolidation service that allows customers to transfer existing pensions across with ease, Penfold boasts a pension that can be set up in under 5 minutes and allows you to top up, change or pause your payments at any time. Penfold pensions are managed by BlackRock and HSBC. Just pick one of six carefully created, low cost investment plans, and let your money work for you. Instantly through its app or web platform.
Taking control of retirement finances
The main objective of this feature was to allow users to take control of their retirement finances by helping them establish and then realise a goal. The level of detail we go into develops as the user progresses through the Penfold experience
Onboarding
The main purpose of the onboarding projection seen above is to inform users of how their money may perform, as opposed to guide them as to what to save for a specific goal. We kept it as simple as possible to avoid cognitive overload and friction. We created projections based on transactional history data from the user if it was available. We then prompt the user to set their own personalised goal.
Retirement Living Standards
We decided to include an illustration of the Retirement Living Standards, from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, because we found our users and the wider population in general were not sure what kind of lifestyle their savings would afford them. The standards show you what life in retirement looks like at three different levels, and what a range of common goods
and services would cost for each level.
The Retirement Living Standards are aimed at cutting through the ambiguity that currently surrounds retirement planning. Presenting these figures helped our users to think in a practical way about the kind of lifestyle they might lead in retirement.
Setting a Goal
I utilised Penfold's familiar UX pattern of Step Progress forms, to gather inputs from the user. These inputs ranged from current salary, whether the user expected or had any inheritance, retirement age and if they wanted to include the state pension
in their projections.
Outputs
Now that the user has a goal, we highlight where there was any shortfall between their projected income and their goal. When this was the case we there took the user on a path where we provided options for ‘fixing’ their goal. These included making a one-off contribution (cash or pension transfer), starting a monthly contribution (if one doesn’t already exist), increasing their monthly contributions or reducing their savings goal.
The output screen looked very similar to the landing screen of this feature at step one (to reduce cognitive load) and now
replaces it as goal has been set.
The screen included a representation of the data between the estimated value at retirement and the pension goal (whether positive or negative), An annual pension savings value which is also displayed in the app’s dashboard, a CTA to increase monthly contributions and an interactive slider to show the effect of increasing or decreasing contributions to the overall pension goal.