Description:

As one of New Zealand’s largest banks, Westpac offers its customers multiple investment options, including KiwiSaver, a voluntary savings scheme to help set New Zealanders up for retirement. Westpac’s internal research found that a significant number of KiwiSaver customers didn’t fully understand their fund choices. So they engaged us to design and develop two digital tools (a Fund Chooser and Projection Calculator) to help educate KiwiSaver customers and enable them to make more informed decisions.

Over the course of a year, we undertook both the discovery and delivery of these tools. Our initial kick-off workshop unearthed the need for a strategy to help users access the digital tools. We also needed to align the new products with Westpac’s brand, which was undergoing a staggered overhaul.

In addition, we needed to ensure that the digital platform could be accessed from a CRM by in-branch staff, to help guide conversations with customers and provide financial advice. To make this seamless, we designed a full-screen overlay to easily access and exit the tools. When launching the tools, customers are asked to input information about themselves so an accurate projection can be given. Rather than overwhelm users with a wall of forms, we designed the product to ask one question at a time, with large selectors and snippets of information to help educate customers along the way.

Our competitor analysis and customer research showed that similar tools offered by competitors were not optimised for mobile. Through our iterative approach, we were able to enhance the mobile experience through design changes, including a fixed header that intuitively changed depending on where the user was on the page.

Over 46,000 customers have used the tools to date. This project showcased the very real, tangible impact that research-based UX and intuitive UI design can have on a product and its users—enabling kiwis to easily make small modifications that could massively increase their KiwiSaver balance upon retirement.