Railways Pension Scheme
A members' portal for half a million people, and the design system underneath it.
- Over half a million members, in three groups who want completely different things from the same portal: active, retired and preserved.
- Lead designer across two Agile sprint teams of six to seven developers and testers each, from discovery workshops to the delivered MVP.
- Call-centre contact fell 23.16% year on year after launch.
( Objective )
Fewer phone calls, not more features.
RPMI wanted a technically robust, scalable portal on Sitefinity, accessible and intuitive for employees and pensioners alike. The measure of success was not engagement — it was the help centre going quieter, because members could finally answer their own questions.
Pensions are complicated, and this scheme's members are not one audience. An active member paying in, a retired member drawing down and a preserved member who left years ago each arrive with a different question. We ran workshops with the client and interviewed members directly to find out what those questions actually were.
( Research )
Three members, three different questions.
Two days of interviews across active, retired and preserved members became personas — and, more usefully, a written list of assumptions with the method that would test each one: Hotjar, surveys, analytics, or going back for another conversation.
( Solution )
Model the pension, then get out of the way.
The hard part was the modelling. Managing funds meant a six-step flow through current holdings, lifestyle strategy, target retirement age and AVCs, with a projection updating as members moved the sliders. The job was to let someone see the consequence of a decision before committing to it, without needing to understand the arithmetic underneath.
Everything ran on one design system — typography, grid, iconography, forms, buttons, widgets, modals and navigation — documented so two sprint teams could build in parallel without drifting apart.
( On site )
The people this portal is for. Track workers, signallers and engineers, most of whom will never think about their pension until the day it matters.
( Outcome )
It went quiet.
The MVP shipped, and the numbers moved in the direction that mattered: more members finding the portal, more of them reading further into it, and fewer of them phoning up to ask.
( Year on year, following launch )
53.66%
increase in organic sessions
Year on year, following launch. [verify]
36.66%
increase in pageviews
Year on year, following launch. [verify]
23.16%
reduction in call-centre contact
Year on year, following launch. The one the brief was written against. [verify]
( Crédits )
- RPMI — client and product ownership
- Two Agile delivery teams — development and test