PlanWise
When Friends Life asked us to design and develop an easy to use
website for their PlanWise product, we were keen to step up and
deliver exactly what they were looking for.
The Potential
The idea of managing your own finances is quite a daunting one.
Pensions and savings can be quite confusing at the best of times.
When placed on a computer, many people might not feel too
confident, so Friends Life identified the need to develop an easy
to use financial management service. They came up with PlanWise; a
service where customers are able to manage their pensions, savings
and other financial products in one location online. What's more is
those customers would also have access to online support for any
concerns they might have.
We had to think about how we might go about creating the website
for this new service with usability and functionality in mind.
The target audience spanned a huge range of customers so the
service had to be presented in an effective way and one that would
be easy to understand.
The Solution
To begin, we created user profiles for all types of potential
customers so that we could really understand a variety of different
perspectives. The types of service users included customers who
were extremely confident managing finances online, customers who
weren't comfortable managing finances in general and customers who
weren't comfortable at all with computers.
Based on this study, we set about designing website structure
that allowed for a smooth and easy user journey no matter what
services a customer wanted. We decided to also develop a short
animation, to accompany the new design; a short of 'guide' for new
and existing users.
Customers were able to sign up and begin their financial
management with just a few clicks while other customers could
either watch the short animation we created to learn more, or
simply call the telephone support offered by the service.
Whilst we created the website, Friends Life wanted to be able
manage the content in the long term. As we designed and built both
the website, we tested and verified that the templates were
compatible with their content management system, Teamsite.
All in all, this project was a major success - the website is
now up and running and AXA remains with us as a long term
client.