Railways Pension Scheme — A members' portal for half a million people, and the design system underneath it.
Railways Pension Scheme — the members' portal
Product design · Service design — Answer Digital
- 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.
- Shipped in 2020 as the scheme's member portal, on a design system that kept two sprint teams building in parallel.
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 portal shipped in 2020. The brief's measure of success was fewer phone calls, and the reporting I saw before I left moved the right way. I don't have those numbers any more, so I won't publish them.
