Virgin Money

In collaboration with Aberdeen Standard, I took a leading role in the redesign of Virgin Money’s investments and pensions platform.

This involved the decommissioning and redesign of two websites and online services, the migration of more than 200,000 customers, as well as new apps for both iOS and Android.

Who we redesigned it for

Guided by user insight, competitor and gap analyses, our goal was to address the unmet needs of four key groups:

1. Busy newbies - Young, self-employed and not considering their future financial self

2. Pension accumulators - Those juggling multiple workplace pensions

3. Over-savers - Frequent savers who feel under-served by historically low interest rates

4. Disengaged investors - Those with dormant investment accounts

Disrupting a crowded market

We began by eliciting user and business intent, understanding our regulatory requirements and analysing our competition. Noisy newcomers to the investments and pensions market included the likes of Pension Bee and Nutmeg, whose value proposition and implementation was compelling. Whilst analysing your competition is a key step, it’s important not to fall into the trap of targeting feature parity for the sake of it. You must understand if the premise of your proposition and the design of your sales journey (and associated tools) are right for your users.

With that said, it was clear that there were some fundamentals that we needed to get right, namely the ability to securely manage your account online, to track your investments and to move money.

Everything needed to be overhauled

As one of two UX Designers working in partnership with Aberdeen Standard and FNZ, we certainly had our work cut out! We shared responsibility for the decommissioning and redesign of two websites and online services, new apps for both iOS and Android, as well as all physical channels.

Bringing investing to life

We began the process of iteratively prototyping, testing and validating our design solutions. We learned a great deal about our proposition, as well as the efficacy of our design system.

Key takeaways included:

1. The importance of developing a sales journey that educated and empowered users to better understand investing

2. Outlining fees, charges, and other relevant details as early as possible

3. To make an informed purchasing decision, potential customers needed to know how much money they would require and be able to compare that figure with the potential returns from Virgin Money’s products. Consequently, investments and pensions calculators comprised a core element of the sales journey. As forecasting models, they needed to be heavily caveated whilst remaining usable, which was another important design consideration.

Making data visualisation accessible

Data visualisation is a challenging aspect of digital design. For many users, visualisation is a common and useful convention in interpreting and understanding trends. If no suitable alternative is provided for individuals with additional visual or cognitive needs, they may miss out on important insights. In the scenario of a pension forecast, users want to know how much their money will be worth at different ages as they approach retirement. We proposed offering screen reader users an option to listen to, or to skip, what their individual forecast sounded like at different age increments, as well as the general trend.

Service design enabled a smooth migration

Transitioning 200,000 people to a new investments and pensions platform required an in-depth knowledge of the people, processes and props involved. We became keenly aware of the diverse ways and means in which our customers were accessing our services, and the physical and digital artefacts involved.

A key decision was to run both the existing and new platform at the same time. This was to ensure that customers had enough time to understand how and why the transition was taking place, and to iron out any bugs. In order to achieve this, we mapped out how new and existing customers would sign in, access help and support, and other key information.