CFS - creating a dashboard for superannuation customers

Colonial First State (CFS) is one of Australia's leading superannuation providers, committed to helping their members achieve their retirement goals. The company has been progressively working to update it's member digital experiences, and the objective of this project was to provide CFS members with a new super dashboard.

My role

Competitive analysis / customer research / ideation / workshopping / wireframing and prototyping / usability testing / interaction and visual design

The problem

Through prior customer research, CFS had identified a number of key needs of their members that needed to be addressed through the online platform:

  • Members want to know that their super account is doing well, at a glance
  • They want to know if their account balance is not doing well, what actions could they take to improve their situation
  • Even if they are 'hands off' with their account, they need a way to be prompted of any important matters they need to address on their super

With the existing super dashboard experience, these simple needs weren't being fully met, so there was an opportunity to improve.

Research

Before diving into new UX research, we undertook a competitor analysis of dashboards, as well as reviewing key website analytics to uncover what items were most important to super members. We found that the top page views were relating to checking balance and performance of their super via their annual statements. This was also aligned with call centre statistics, where one of the top call queries was to check balance. We decided that prior to undertaking in-person usability testing, we wanted to gather some quantitative data surrounding what were the top tasks and pieces of content members expected on a super dashboard. We designed an online card sort with a broad range of topics, so that participants could rank items that were most meaningful and important to them. Some of the top items were:

  • A snapshot of account balance
  • A summary of performance of their investment over the year
  • A summary of how their balance was tracking over time
  • A super contributions tracker
  • A prompt to keep your account up to date if anything was missing or required action

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Initial findings

We synthesised these insights from the card sorting exercise and developed hypotheses to form the foundation of future usability testing

  • If we design the dashboard to provide succinct insights on balance and performance, then super members will have an 'at a glance' view of their super account to address any burning questions they have
  • If we provide notifications of high-impact account items on the dashboard, then super members will be able to stay proactively on top of their account with no surprises

Through collaboration with key stakeholders, we ideated on the design, layout and key features before taking things further:

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Understanding users

After developing a stronger understanding of the top items that super members were looking for, as well as ideating on features and potential layouts, we started to plan the usability testing of our dashboard prototypes. It was important that we recruited participants that reflected a similar mix to our end users, meaning a range of super and investment products, as well as different situations in relation to seeking financial advice. Here is a summary of participants we tested with:

User testing

Using an interactive prototype, we tested out a new super dashboard, focusing on testing tasks around identifying key information such as super balance over time, admin fees and recent super contributions. These were some of the key insights and findings:

  • There was a strong tendency towards using the hamburger menu to identify key items in mobile responsive view. For example, to identify transactions such as latest super contributions or admin fee breakdowns, 4 out of 5 participants went to the hamburger menu as their first or second click (instead of scrolling and searching the dashboard).
  • Most participants didn't understand that you could click on the financial years in the bar chart to toggle the balance breakdown information below it, which meant this interaction was not intuitive.
  • There was a desire for more visuals, with 2 participants noting the importance of visuals to assist understanding of the information.

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Final design

How I incorporated feedback into the final design:

  • Ensuring that all key items that participants were looking for were also available in the navigation layer of the site in addition to the dashboard. Not all users are going to complete their key tasks in the same way so we need to give them options.
  • The bar chart and balance breakdown were giving a much stronger visual connection by housing them in the same dashboard card.
  • We improved the concessional contribution tracker, as well as adding CFS-branded pictograms to each card to improve the visual appeal and engagement of the dashboard.

Conclusions

The final dashboard design for CFS super members is targeted to go live in May 2021. After this feature is delivered, the key metrics we will be measuring for success are as follows:

  • Using page and interaction-level analytics to measure time spent on the dashboard and click throughs to more pages. This will help us to assess how engaging the content is to the user.
  • Also we will use analytics to measure the click rates of tooltips. This is a key guide to assess the comprehension of complex financial concepts, and to see whether members need more help to understand the dashboard content.
  • NPS and feedback surveys - users will be prompted to give feedback directly on the dashboard. This will provide some important qualitative insights around what is working well and what needs to be improved in further iterations of the feature.
  • Call centre stats - we will be looking to see if there is any increase or decrease on the amount of queries to the call centre around basic information that is available on the dashboard such as latest balance or latest employer contribution information. A decrease in these types of calls is a strong indicator that the super dashboard is heading in the right direction and meeting member's needs.