Bringing Pension Guidance Into the App

Turning an existing content library into a customer experience that informs, reassures and reduces friction

Executive Summary

PensionBee already produced a substantial amount of useful content to help customers understand their pensions and the wider industry. The challenge was that much of this guidance lived on the website, while customers increasingly managed their pensions through the app.

I joined the project as the newly appointed Head of UX with a hypothesis: bringing relevant content into the app could help customers feel more informed and confident about their retirement, answer questions at the point they arose and ultimately reduce the need for customers to contact support.

Rather than simply transferring the existing content into the app, I established a research-led process to understand what customers actually found useful, how they accessed and consumed information, and what mechanisms could make content feel relevant within the context of managing a pension.

The work combined structured research planning, cross-functional collaboration, prototyping, moderated customer interviews and iterative delivery. Two iterations established an initial content experience and a set of recommendations for improving how content could be surfaced and personalised.

The resulting experience significantly increased content page views and directly increased time spent in the app. More importantly, the work established a foundation for increasingly tailored content recommendations and deeper integration throughout the app.

The Opportunity

Pension customers have a constant need for information.

They need to understand what is happening with their pension, what different decisions mean for their future and how wider changes in the pensions industry might affect them.

PensionBee already had the expertise and content to answer many of these questions.

The problem was accessibility.

Much of the content existed on the website, while customers were increasingly using the app to manage their pensions.

That created an opportunity to bring the two experiences together.

Our initial hypothesis was straightforward:

If we make the content customers already need available within the app, we can help them become more informed and confident about their retirement while reducing the need to seek answers elsewhere.

But there was an important question behind that hypothesis:

What content would customers actually find useful, and how should it be delivered?

Defining the Research

As the newly appointed Head of UX, I wanted to establish a robust process before moving into solution mode.

The objective wasn't simply to determine whether customers liked the idea of content in the app.

We needed to understand:

• Which content customers found most useful or relevant.

• How they currently accessed information.

• How they consumed it.

• What context prompted them to seek information.

• How content could be prioritised.

• Which delivery mechanisms could make the experience more useful over time.

I created a detailed research plan for stakeholder sign-off, establishing the questions we needed to answer and the approach the team would follow.

I also deliberately involved colleagues from different areas of the business early in the project.

This created shared ownership of the problem rather than positioning UX research as something that happened separately from the wider product team.

Making the Research Feel Like the Product

One challenge with researching an in-app experience is that a conventional research exercise can make the experience feel abstract.

Rather than asking customers to react to static screens, I created a rich Figma prototype that allowed participants to experience the proposed content environment as though they were using the real app.

This gave us a much stronger basis for understanding behaviour.

Customers could explore the content, navigate between information and interact with recommendations within the context of the wider app experience.

The research therefore became less about asking:

"Do you like this?"

and more about observing:

"What do you actually do when this information is available to you?"

Bringing the Team Into the Research

I also wanted the research to be something the wider team experienced rather than something UX conducted and reported back afterwards.

Colleagues from different departments were involved from the early stages and participated in the research process.

Moderated interviews gave us the opportunity to understand customer behaviour and attitudes directly, while observation allowed the team to see how people interacted with the proposed experience.

Following the research, I facilitated an observations and recommendations session with the team.

Rather than simply presenting findings, we worked together to interpret what we had seen, identify the implications and prioritise recommendations.

That distinction was important.

The output wasn't a research report that sat alongside the product roadmap.

It became part of the process for deciding what the product should do next.

From Research to Iteration

The research established the foundation for delivering the content experience iteratively.

The first iteration created an initial baseline for bringing existing content into the app.

Rather than attempting to solve personalisation, discovery and navigation simultaneously, we could establish the core experience and use customer behaviour to identify where further investment would have the greatest value.

The next iteration introduced recommendations based on what we had learned.

This created a feedback loop:

Research → Prototype → Delivery → Behaviour → Recommendation → Iteration

That approach allowed the team to learn from the live experience rather than trying to predict every requirement upfront.

What We Learned

The initial delivery demonstrated that customers would engage with content within the app.

Across the first two iterations, overall content page views increased significantly and the availability of content directly increased session time within the app.

That provided evidence that bringing content into the app was changing how customers interacted with information.

However, the research and subsequent behaviour also highlighted where the experience could improve.

Recommendations could become more effective if content was categorised more intelligently within the backend, creating the foundations for more tailored recommendations.

The work also highlighted the opportunity to connect content more deeply into the rest of the app.

Rather than requiring customers to deliberately enter a dedicated content area, relevant guidance could be surfaced contextually through deep links from other parts of the experience.

These weren't failures of the initial solution.

They were the next opportunities revealed through iteration.

Building a More Intelligent Content Experience

The project therefore evolved beyond simply moving website content into the app.

The longer-term opportunity became creating an experience where information could appear when it was relevant to what a customer was trying to understand or achieve.

That required thinking about content as part of the product experience rather than as a separate publishing function.

The work towards better backend categorisation would enable more relevant recommendations.

Deep-linking would allow content to become connected to other parts of the customer journey.

Together, these changes would move the experience from:

"Here is our content."

towards:

"Here is the information that is useful to you right now."

That shift represented the more significant product opportunity.

Outcomes

Customer engagement

Two iterations produced a significant increase in overall content page views.

The availability of content within the app also directly increased session time, demonstrating that customers were engaging with the information once it was made accessible within their existing product environment.

Product learning

The project established a clearer understanding of which content mechanisms were useful and where the experience needed to evolve.

Future capability

The recommendations created a roadmap for more intelligent content delivery through improved categorisation and more contextual access via deep linking.

Organisational capability

The project established a structured, collaborative research process that brought colleagues from different disciplines into discovery, validation and prioritisation rather than treating UX as a downstream delivery function.

Reflection

This project was an important early example of how I approached leadership as a newly appointed Head of UX.

My role wasn't simply to design the experience.

It was to establish the conditions for the team to make better product decisions.

That meant creating a rigorous research process, bringing the right people into the problem early, making the proposed experience tangible through prototyping, involving the wider team directly in customer research and turning what we learned into prioritised product recommendations.

The most important outcome wasn't simply that customers viewed more content.

It was that we established a repeatable way of moving from hypothesis to evidence to product iteration.

The original question was whether customers would benefit from having PensionBee's existing guidance within the app.

The more valuable discovery was that once information became part of the product experience, the opportunity shifted from delivering content to delivering the right content at the right moment.

That is the difference between adding a feature and designing a product capability.