“We need to stop; we need to understand the consequences on the users of the decision you've made.”
- Matt Woods
Aviva — Pensions & Regulated Journeys
The decision to retire and start drawing down on a pension is a significant financial milestone that can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. While the prospect of a more leisurely lifestyle is appealing, the financial implications of retirement can cause anxiety.
Financial concerns are a common source of anxiety at the point of making the decision as to how much to take from your pension as an income, lump sum. ‘What if it doesn’t last long enough?’ is a particular theme, individuals may worry about whether their pension income will be sufficient to cover their living expenses, especially in the face of rising costs of living and potential healthcare expenses. They may be concerned about making poor investment decisions or running out of money before they die.
Aviva are providers of both Workplace pensions and SIPPs (Self Invested Personal Pension); at the point where this project was initiated they only offered Drawdown (taking an income and/or lump sum) via the telephone with a dedicated pension team, and paper forms.
TL;DR
The Problem
Aviva needed to reduce the cost and friction of pension servicing, while also meeting accessibility and Consumer Duty expectations.
The existing journey was split across offline processes, legacy systems, operational workarounds and fragmented product ownership. That made it hard for users to understand what was happening and hard for teams to deliver a consistent service.
The Approach
I mapped the wider service, identified the points where users, operations and systems were falling out of sync, and redesigned the experience around clearer journeys, stronger validation, better recovery paths and more transparent decision points.
Outcome
The work standardised key pension journeys across Aviva web and Wealthify, improved self-service, reduced support dependency and delivered an estimated 40% uplift in user satisfaction.
Impact: A positive fully accessible approach for customers reaching retirement; for the business it changed the way they approached projects, and after my challenge presentation had been shown at the Executive Steering Comity they decided for it to be distributed as case study for ways of working, placing accessibility and the user at the start of any project thinking.
The Problem.
The business needed to reduce the cost of pension servicing and move more journeys into self-service.
But the existing experience was not ready for that shift.
Users were dealing with complex pension decisions, unclear next steps and fragmented journeys that moved between digital screens, offline processes, support teams and legacy systems.
At the same time, Aviva had to meet stronger expectations around accessibility, Consumer Duty and good customer outcomes.
This made the design problem bigger than a digital journey. The product had to work as part of a wider service, with enough clarity and protection to support users making important financial decisions.
Understanding the Service.
Before changing the interface, I needed to understand how the service actually worked.
That meant mapping the full journey across user needs, operational processes, backend systems, policy constraints, support touchpoints and regulatory requirements.
The work exposed where the existing experience was brittle: unclear handoffs, inconsistent states, poor error recovery, unsupported edge cases and moments where users could be left uncertain about what had happened or what they needed to do next.
Once those gaps were visible, it became possible to design the journey around the real service, not just the visible screens.
Mapping the Future-State Journey.
The future-state journey needed to show how the service should work across digital and non-digital touchpoints.
That meant mapping the user journey, internal processes, decision points, system dependencies and operational handoffs together, so Product, Engineering, Operations, Compliance and Legal could see the same service model.
This helped move the work away from isolated screens and toward a joined-up journey: what the user sees, what the system needs to check, what operations need to handle, and where the product must provide reassurance, validation or recovery.
The aim was to make the service easier to understand before making it easier to use.
Designing the Digital Experience.
The digital experience needed to make complex pension tasks feel manageable without hiding the seriousness of the decisions being made.
I worked across onboarding, drawdown, transfers, withdrawals, recurring contributions and open-banking flows, including Pay by Bank. The design had to account for eligibility, KYC/AML, SCA step-ups, payment failures, retry states, confirmation patterns and clear next steps.
A user should not be left wondering whether money had moved, whether a request had been submitted, whether an error was recoverable, or whether they needed to contact support.
That meant designing the journey around trust: clear status, clear consequences, clear recovery and clear ownership.
Design as a Governance Mechanism
“We need to stop; we need to understand the consequences on the users of the decision you've made.”
— Matt Woods
The project had too many uncoordinated branches, too many stakeholders — 26 at one point — and a hard delivery deadline tied to the end of the tax year.
A separate solution-design workstream had been under pressure to secure early sign-off for the technical stack and backend approach. Because that work had happened largely in isolation, the wider team had not fully understood what the signed-off solution would mean for the user journey.
What came to light in a meeting was serious.
The approved backend approach would have forced users through a broken online, offline and separate-online journey. It would not provide an accessible experience, and it would create a clear Consumer Duty risk.
At that point, I raised a red flag.
I explained the user and regulatory consequences to the project team, then quickly put together an evidence deck showing why the approach needed to be paused and reconsidered. I asked the Aviva Accessibility Lead to add their weight to the argument and shared the deck with the Digital Director.
The project was put on hold while the solution-design and backend approach was re-evaluated.
That intervention was later presented to the Executive Steering Committee, where it was held up as a valuable example of how teams should approach this kind of work: accessibility and user impact had to be considered from the start, not retrofitted after the technical direction had already been approved.
Outcome
The redesigned pension journeys gave users clearer ways to complete important financial tasks without depending on offline support by default.
The work improved self-service across Aviva web and Wealthify, strengthened accessibility and Consumer Duty alignment, and reduced the operational burden created by unclear or incomplete digital journeys.
It also created a clearer shared model for teams working across product, engineering, operations, compliance and legal.
The result was an estimated 40% uplift in user satisfaction, alongside meaningful support deflection and operational cost reduction.