Increasing pension applications

Outcomes

• 51% reduction in drop-off rate on the personal details form

• 39% increase in pension applications

• 62% increase in conversions from the best-performing CTA button

The challenge

After the acquisition of Standard Life by Phoenix Group, the 2022 marketing strategy put personal pensions at the centre of the consumer proposition. The problem was that the pension journey had been built to an earlier design standard and was poorly surfaced within the site. Nobody had tested it recently and there was no reliable sense of where it was failing.

Before making any changes, I needed to understand exactly what was wrong.

My role

I led the UX work across two connected streams: a research and redesign programme to fix the core journey, and a marketing programme to drive more traffic into it and increase conversion. I worked with marketing, content writers and an agile product squad throughout.

Evaluating the existing journey

I ran a round of moderated usability testing to assess the current experience. I recruited 8 participants using a screener that targeted people who already held a personal or workplace pension elsewhere.

The research objectives were straightforward: how easy was it to find the pension application from the homepage and how long did it take?

What I found:

• The average time to locate where to start the pension application was 3 minutes 46 seconds.

• The average time to complete the application once started was 5 minutes 40 seconds.

• The homepage routed users to a pension contact details page, a dead-end that caused repeated confusion.

• Pension product pages were buried several levels deep in the pensions and retirement mega-navigation.

• There was no prominent call to action to start an application anywhere on the key entry pages.

Nearly four minutes just to find the starting point is a significant barrier. For site with thousands of visitors, promoting personal pensions as a core product, this level of friction was costing applications at scale.

I prepared a findings presentation with observations and prioritised recommendations and worked with stakeholders to agree on which changes to address first.

Redesigning the pension journey

With the research findings agreed and prioritised, I made targeted UX improvements to the journey and redesigned the interface to bring it in line with the current design system. This included fixing the navigation issues, surfacing clearer calls to action at the right moments and removing the routing errors that had sent users to the wrong pages.

I supported the development team through the build phase as part of the agile product squad, reviewing work in progress and making sure the implemented experience matched the designs.

After the redesigned journey went live, I compared analytics against the previous version. Drop-off on the personal details form fell by 51%.

Optimising landing pages and CTAs

The second stream of work focused on acquisition. I worked with the marketing team to design hero banners and a dedicated landing page to promote the pension journey and drive qualified traffic into it.

To maximise conversion, I ran A/B tests using Google Optimize, testing variations of the CTA buttons and page layouts to identify what performed best. This is where the data was most direct: the best-performing CTA button produced a 62% increase in conversions compared to the control.

Across the full programme, the improved journey and the optimised landing pages working together and the pension applications increased by 39%.

What I learned

This project is a good example of why research and optimisation need to work together. The redesign fixed real problems identified through testing and produced a meaningful drop-off improvement. But the biggest application gains came from combining a better journey with better acquisition, getting more of the right people to the right starting point.

The 51% drop-off reduction on the personal details form was also a reminder of how much friction can accumulate in a journey that hasn't been looked at recently. Nobody had designed those problems in deliberately. They had just never been measured, so nobody knew they were there.

Running the usability tests before touching a single screen was the right call. It meant the subsequent design work was fixing actual problems, not assumptions.