Aviva - Workplace Pension System Migration
Design a tool for Workplace Pension Managers
My role
I was contracted in for 6 months as Senior UX Designer at Aviva, working on multiple projects. This particular project required design leadership across the product team, bringing in multiple stakeholders from across the country to gather requirements and ideate design solutions for a holistic platform integration.
Background
Historically, the Aviva workplace pensions system resided on multiple, complex legacy platforms, all with different functionalities. As part of a major platform migration, my goal was to incorporate all platform interfaces into one consistent design using the existing Aviva UX framework.
Visit to customer call centre
I set off beginning trying to understand the users by visiting the Aviva pensions workplace call centre, where I was able to listen in on calls for two days solid and hear end-users raise complaints and issues they were experiencing with the current system first hand. This provided valuable insight into user needs and pain-points with the existing system and I could also start to map-out the different user groups and fill in some key persona traits for each one.
Persona creation
I created a set of personas that helped us articulate and define the user needs across user profiles. They were also useful helping us to assist communication with the rest of the product team as we could use each persona to help us frame discussions around certain use cases during workshops.
Ideation workshops
I facilitated multiple stakeholder workshops to enable us to bring all key stakeholders in from around the country to collaborate tackle the following:
Review user research outputs
Define user requirements
Define user journeys
Concept sketching
User story writing
User flow mapping
Using the requirements generated from the series of workshops I was then able to start mapping-out a more detailed user flow of each core use case, including:
Making a payment
Adding a member
Designing with the design system
Aviva had quite a comprehensive atomic design system and so when the time came to start exploring multiple design ideas I used all the existing components available to me first to see if I could make the interface work. Restricting myself just to the components in the design system was limiting and challenging but sometimes I find imposing restrictive parameters to solve a problem can yield more creative outputs. In scenarios where the design system did not support our requirements, I had to setup sessions with the owners of the design system to put forward a case for new components to be introduced to the design system. In the occasional case where I was not able to get the bespoke design component added to the design system, then the product team had to take on the ‘technical debt’ and code it themselves.
End design
The end design essentially comprised of a portal where workplace pensions managers could log in and complete two main tasks: 1) make payments to employees and 2) add new members. The screens below shows some of the steps for the payment journey with design rationale annotations on the side.
Challenges on the project
Incorporating complex workplace design requirements into the UX framework was a challenge as the framework was largely crafted for customer-facing purposes rather than data-intensive tasks. To get around this I utilised the existing framework in creative ways, and where necessary, created new components as additions to the framework.
Also, it was not always possible to gain access to users during this project so as a substitute I triangulated the findings from the call centre, Guerilla testing, competitor reviews, and design peer reviews with the rest of my design team on a regular basis.