Pension drawdowns and ISA transfers

Home About

Pension drawdowns

In 2020 the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) introduced investment pathways with the idea of making it clear to the end users of how they can withdraw their pension savings. So all financial organisations that offered SIPP (self-invested personal pension) and other pension products needed to make investment pathways a part of their pension drawdown journeys. As a product team we needed to consider how to add the enhancements to the existing journeys for the customers who are taking their first journey to start withdrawing money and for the customers who already started their decumulation process as well as how to clarify various ways of taking the money out of the pension fund.

Outcomes

Transactional journey for pension drawdown has been implemented by the deadline set up by the FCA.
ISA transfer enhancements have been implemented to improve user experience on the platform.
Information architecture and navigation redesign have been completed but, unfortunately, haven't prioritised for implementation (as of summer 2025 I can still see the old navigation in place.)

Process

First step was to understand and document user flows and user journeys to be able to access how the pathways will fit it. In collaboration with stakeholders, product manager and content designer we've nailed down the process, and documented any updates required for actual transactional journeys. For me it resulted in created 2 prototypes with 40+ screens each.

Another challenge was to improve the communication on the website to explain existing ways of drawing down funds and a new concept of pathways introduced by the FCA.

ISA transfers

While working on pensions, we (a small product team) were tasked with reviewing ISA transfer journeys, and I've updated the designs of the transactional journey of the ISA transfer to incorporate UX best practices:

the form layout is implemented as a single column for better usability - see recommendations from the Nielsen Norman Group
the stepper design was changed to communicate clearer the progress to users
the final confirmation step was decluttered and contained clear next steps depending on the ISA transfer route (paper or electronic)
the date of birth set of dropdowns were converted to the input text fields - see results of usability testing by GDS

Navigation improvements

Working on new pages for pensions made the product team realise that the information architecture on the website needs improving. Some pages were sat under headers which did not seem to be intuitive to us so we've worked together on variations of the navigation, and outsources user research (treejack testing) to an external agency.

3 variations of the information architecture have been tested on the platform "Optimal workshop", and the winning option has been scheduled for implementation.