Increasing pension applications at Standard Life

Outcomes

• +39% pension applications

• 51% less drop-off on the personal details form

• +62% conversion on the best CTA

Nearly four minutes

That's how long it took people in my usability tests just to find where to start a pension application on standardlife.co.uk. That was before they filled in a single field.

In 2022, after Phoenix Group acquired Standard Life, the new marketing strategy put personal pensions at the centre of the consumer offer. But the pension journey had been built years earlier, to an older design standard, and it was hard to find on the site. Nobody had tested it recently, so nobody knew where it was failing.

My role

I was the lead UX designer for the site. I led two connected streams of work, research and design to fix the core journey, and a marketing stream to bring more of the right people into it. I worked with marketing, content writers and an agile product squad throughout.

Finding out what was broken

Before changing anything, I ran moderated usability tests with 8 people who already had a personal or workplace pension elsewhere. I wanted to answer two simple questions: how easy is it to find the pension application from the homepage, and how long does it take?

What I found:

• It took 3 minutes 46 seconds on average to find where to start.

• Completing the application then took another 5 minutes 40 seconds.

• The homepage sent people to a pension contact details page, a dead end that confused almost everyone.

• The pension product pages were buried several levels deep in the main navigation.

• None of the key entry pages had a clear call to action to start an application.

I presented the findings with prioritised recommendations, and agreed with stakeholders which problems to fix first.

Fixing the journey

I fixed the navigation, added clear calls to action at the right moments, and removed the routing errors that sent people to the wrong pages. I also redesigned the interface to match the current design system. During the build I worked inside the product squad, reviewing work in progress so the live journey matched the designs.

After launch, I compared the analytics with the old version. Drop-off on the personal details form fell by 51%.

Bringing more people in

The second stream was about acquisition. I worked with the marketing team on hero banners and a dedicated landing page for the pension journey.

Then I ran A/B tests on CTA buttons and page layouts. The best CTA button increased conversions by 62% compared to the original.

Impact

• +39% pension applications across the whole programme

• 51% less drop-off on the personal details form

• +62% conversion from the best-performing CTA

What I learned

The redesign fixed real problems and cut drop-off. But the biggest growth in applications came when the better journey and the better landing pages worked together, and more of the right people reached the right starting point.

Nobody had designed those problems on purpose. They had built up over years because nobody measured the journey. Testing before touching a single screen meant I fixed real problems, not guesses.