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Is it possible to design Trust?
A redesign of the CPF experience
Is it possible to design Trust?
A redesign of the CPF experience
Is it possible to design Trust?
A redesign of the CPF experience
Is it possible to design Trust?
A redesign of the CPF experience
Is it possible to design Trust?
A redesign of the CPF experience
Is it possible to design Trust?
An approach to redesigning the CPF experience for Singaporeans
by transforming how they see retirement.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
For our first student group project at General Assembly, we were tasked to redesign the website of the Central Provident Fund Board (CPF).
In a 2 week design sprint, we used the insights gained from User Research to Ideate and create a prototype, and Iterated our designs based on data from a Usability test.
TEAM
Ashley Tan,
Cassandra Chen,
Chen Keyue,
Elvin Ong
ROLE
User Research
UI Design
Prototyping
User Testing
DURATION
2 Weeks
JUL 2021
About cpf
CPF is a compulsory comprehensive savings and pension plan that aims to secure the retirement of working Singaporeans/Permanent Residents (PR), through lifelong income, housing and healthcare financing.
The Problem
At some point during every working Singaporean/PR's life, we will find ourselves inevitably having to scour the CPF website to find information regarding the many schemes and how they affect us.
Insights from our User research revealed to us that there is a mistrust between CPF and the people it was intended to benefit. The gap in knowledge the users are experiencing is giving way to a deep seated mistrust of the system.
The Solution
We came up with a 3-pronged approach to bridge the knowledge gap between the users and the information they need by re-framing it in a way that is simple to understand and navigate.
We aimed to transform the way people see retirement by speaking to users in a language they understand.
01 INTERACTIVE LANDING PAGE
Redesign of the new home page to include an interactive scroll bar that allows users to filter the scheme information according to life milestones
02 LIFE MILESTONES SCHEME PAGE
We extended the 'Milestones Idea' across to the Schemes Page to provide clarity on how the various schemes relate to each user.
03 PERSONALISED DASHBOARD
A New design of the dashboard allows users to customize the first page they see when they log in to only show them information they need.
Redesign of home page to reflect CPF's mission statement and life milestones.
Interactive scroll bar allows users to filter CPF schemes according to their life milestones.
Users now only see the specific information they need and shortcuts to quick actions they regularly take.
Redesign of home page to reflect CPF's mission statement and life milestones.
how we believe we designed trust
01: The new home page design reminds users that CPF is about them, by relating their mission with an interactive scroll bar of life milestones.
02: Presenting the schemes in categories that relate to the users' life milestones aims to provide clarity and allow quick access to relevant information.
03: The new dashboard aims to streamline the process for users to be able to access information they need quickly without the clutter.
Let's dive into the process of how we arrived at the solution!
THE PROCESS
Initial Research
We studied their existing website to understand the Information Architecture and the value they are providing the citizens.
IS CPF doing what they set out to do?
We kicked off the project with preliminary research to try understand if CPF managed to achieve their goal of securing the retirement for the working citizens.
Our key learnings are:
Younger Singaporeans (21-40yo) are losing confidence in CPF
"Only 45% of the survey cohort cited CPF as their primary source of retirement"
More than half of Singaporeans think that CPF returns are unfair
"XX% of 1000 Singaporean survey respondents believe that the CPF System does not give them a fair return"
Call for greater transparency
"CPF issues can be resolved, Others call for greater transparency in the deployment of CPF funds."
Repeated clarification required by the government
Grim Outlook on retirement
2/3 Singaporean retirees regret not planning earlier for retirement.
"more than half of the respondents who do not believe they could save enough for retirement are between the ages of 25 and 40"
All of this left us wondering, with the great mission that CPF had set out with, why are they still facing these issues?
USER INTERVIEWS
Next, we conducted user interviews with 22 working professionals across the ages 24-55 to better understand their experience of the CPF website and their views towards retirement.
Goals:
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understand their experience of the current website and their difficulties
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What do they do when they can't find the information that they need
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What are their current views of their own retirement?
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What have they done to prepare for their own retirement and why?
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What are some brands that they feel they can trust and why?
KEY INSIGHTS
"The current website is way too wordy and filled with jargon that I do not understand."
"I feel that CPF's Lack of Communication is confusing and tiresome"
"I feel that CPF is not doing a good job on Providing Clarity on the system. "
"I feel that CPF does not have my best interests at heart."
USER JOURNEY MAP
We created a User Persona of Raymond based on the insights of our user interviews and created his journey map to visualize and a gain a deeper understanding of his experience with CPF.
Raymond, 30
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Lives with his wife in his new BTO they bought to stay close to his parents
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He finds himself far off removed from the concept of retirement
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But as a woke millennial who is currently supporting his parents and planning to have a kid soon,
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He is worried about his financial health and wants to escape the Sandwich Generation!
We came to a consensus that Raymond is curious to learn more about CPF and how it relates to him. However,
He is faced with long bodies of text, acronyms and unfamiliar jargon that makes trying to understand his own retirement a monumental task.
After getting frustrated from hopping from link to link and scouring the pages, Raymond resorts to googling his information and finds it on third party websites like The Woke Salaryman, Seedly and MoneySmart.
Thereafter Raymond proceeds to begin investing for his retirement through other avenues with the mentality that "CPF alone will not suffice"
-BAD ENDING-
"I find checking for policies too wordy and hard to digest."
"I usually don't end up finding what I'm looking for."
"It's like they are speaking another language."
"I usually just end up using Google to search for the specific information I need."
defining the problem
Why did this happen?
In Summary, Raymond is saying:
“I don’t trust that CPF has my best interests at heart because they don’t communicate clearly with me”
Raymond needs a clear & simple way of understanding how CPF matters to him so that he can trust CPF and feel more secure about his retirement plans & financial future.
defining the SOLUTION
How can we make this better for people like raymond?
It became clear to us that our proposed design needs to be able to bridge this gap in communication to rebuild the users’ trust in CPF.
Because this was a 2 week design sprint, we decided to narrow our focus on 2 key tasks users perform on the website.
01: Reading up on CPF Schemes
Users are scouring through loads of text to try and understand how their retirement funds can be used during different parts of their lives
02: Obtaining of statements and contribution history
Almost all users end up only using the website when absolutely necessary, which is to check their personal statements (to see how much they have in their CPF accounts) and to obtain contribution history (required when applying for loans)
What's Next?
To understand the perspectives of users' on the various schemes, we created a hybrid card sort that allowed users to sort the CPF schemes into broader categories.
These broader categories were derived from insights gained during our user interviews. We learnt that users only used the website during certain milestones in their lives, e.g. for their personal statements and obtain their contribution history
Card sort results
What we learnt:
Main categories most users classified schemes were under Employment, Family, Health, House, Retirement and Others.
One thing we were surprised to learn was that some schemes were classified in more than one category because they crossed between 2 major categories, for example, Eldershield which was split between Health and Retirement.
IDEATION
DESIGN STUDIO
We next used a Design studio session to quickly ideate on solutions as a group using sketches and combined the features we felt were the best from our different solutions.
In this process, we went through several rounds rapid sketches (10 minutes each) creating ideas on paper quickly to ideate solutions.
After settling on the final sketches of the key frames we needed to design the solution, we got to work creating an interactive prototype to bring our idea to life and perform user testing.
usability testing
With our prototype ready, we conducted usability tests with 5 participants.
KEY FINDINGS:
- All Users went straight to the schemes page because they were unaware that the interactive scroll bar was clickable.
- 3/5 Users were unsure about the 'see more' button and where it led.
- 3/5 Users users missed the search bar of the widget adding screen.
These findings shaped our iterations in the next step to create our final hi-fi prototype.
Overall, participants felt that:
- They enjoyed exploring the schemes by category
- They felt that it was easier to find the information that pertained to them in the specific part of life they are in
- They were open to learning more about their own retirement planning.
iterations made
1. Design for interactive scroll bar was iterated to make it more obvious it was clickable.
2. See more button was enlarged and arrow was included to suggest link with the schemes above it.
3. Search bar for the widget screen was redesigned with a prompting text and background to enhance visibility by increasing contrast.
going forward,
Although it may be impossible to quantify and measure an increase of trust as a result of a new design, we thought about some metrics that might be a suitable indicator of the success of our design if it were implemented.
1. More time spent on schemes pages would indicate users actually reading about the schemes
2. Increase in user traffic to the site and average visit duration.
3. Better satisfaction ratings
4. Lesser negative press headlines (per year) after implementation of new design!
What are some challenges we faced?
- Project time management
- Pushing the project beyond basic feature changes and more into how to transform the experience for users
What I would've done differently if we had more time:
- Our project allowed us limited time to focus on one core group of audience that was in the form of our user persona Raymond. It would have been great for us to be able to conduct more users in different age groups, especially those who are nearing the age of retirement.
- Further improve on the new dashboard design to have a more seamless onboarding process possibly through auto-assigning widgets to the dashboard based on the user's age and stage of life.