minPension: Helping to shape a national pension initiative through extensive research

Requirements

minPension is a joint initiative between the Swedish government and Swedish pension providers. The initiative’s mission is to give every citizen an aggregated view of their entire pension investments through a simple, one-stop-shop portal. The minPension portal shows a user their public, occupational and private pensions, and allows them to make pension forecasts so that they can make better financial decisions as they move towards retirement.

Pensions are complex and minPension recognised that the portal’s design needed to reflect user needs and expectations in order to be successful. MinPension approached Nexer in 2015 to bring a more user-centred approach to research and design for the portal’s UI and mobile app, and we've been working with them through an iterative product development cycle ever since. 

Impact

Our social and behavioural psychologists were able to develop motivation and engagement models that helped to design content that better met user needs. These models were based explicitly on the outputs of our user research sessions with almost 800 users.

We created user personas and a detailed customer journey map based on our research. The journey map optimised user flow through the portal.

This project led to a long-term partnership working on the minPension product. We are proud of the role the Nexer team played in getting buy-in for a user-centred approach at MinPension and in developing their user-centred design approach.

How we did it

We conducted detailed, comprehensive user research and data analysis:

• Literature reviews on pensions and on digital literacy, particularly focusing on terminology and learning models
• An understanding of site goals and current analytics
• In-depth interviews with 30 users
• A survey to validate (or otherwise) our qualitative findings with almost 800 users

Collaborative, iterative solution design:

• Development of nine user personas, a conceptual model for learning and engagement with pensions (which we called ‘The Pension Ladder’), and a detailed customer journey map that optimised the user flow through the portal.
• Co-design workshops to collaboratively design the new user experience and capture key journeys or interactions in a prototype, which we subsequently used for iterative usability testing.

Services

• In-depth research of user needs 
• User motivation and engagement modelling
• Developing actionable insights to help our partner meet their goals 
• Service and experience design 

What came next

We've worked on further projects with MinPension and researched, prototyped and tested new features for the portal. The types of projects that we worked on with minPension changed as our shared understanding grew based on what we were learning together. Over time, it was rewarding to see the development of their understanding of what makes good user-centred product and service design. MinPension have now built capability internally for UX and usability, based on the foundation we created together.

The portal is now seen as a huge success and an example for other countries to follow, including the UK. Over 99.5% of all Swedish pension capital is covered and it has 2.5M registered users – which amounts to over 50% of the eligible population. We’d love to see similar statistics for the UK population!