Case study
A 10-month cross-functional engagement to rethink the structure, content, and design of Aviva's digital support experience — reducing call centre demand and improving customer self-service.
Client
Aviva
My role
Project Lead
Type
Support Experience Design
Duration
10 months
Design Leadership
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
UX Strategy
Digital Transformation
Overview
Aviva's website support experience played a critical role in helping customers find information, resolve issues, and self-serve across insurance, pensions, investments, and other financial services products. However, the existing support content had become difficult to navigate, inconsistent across business areas, and hard for customers to act on.
This created a dual problem: customers were struggling to find the information they needed online, while Aviva continued to carry high operational costs through reliance on call centre support.
I led a 10-month cross-functional engagement to rethink the structure, content, and design of the support experience. The work began with a discovery phase to identify the scale of the problem and build the case for change — leading to approval for a design and delivery phase, followed by a wider rollout across remaining business units.
The Challenge
The support content needed to serve customers across multiple business areas, each with different products, service journeys, operational priorities, and legacy content. Over time, this had resulted in a support experience that was fragmented and difficult to use.
The challenge was not simply to redesign a set of pages — it was to create a scalable support framework that could work across Aviva's business while remaining feasible within existing platform constraints.
Customers were often unable to find key information easily or complete support tasks without additional help. From a business perspective, this increased pressure on call centre teams and contributed to avoidable operational cost.
My role
I was the Project Lead, responsible for leading the engagement from discovery through design and implementation. My responsibilities included setting the direction for the team, structuring the discovery approach, leading stakeholder engagement, authoring proposals, running kick-off workshops, and presenting findings and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
I also recruited and shaped the team — interviewing members, identifying capability gaps, mentoring junior colleagues, and ensuring the right mix of design, content, analysis, and delivery expertise was in place throughout the project.
I acted as the primary point of contact for senior stakeholders across product, design, AEM platform ownership, content, operations, and business units — leading regular updates, reviewing team outputs, and keeping the work aligned to both customer needs and business priorities.
Working within constraints
The project had several important constraints that shaped how we approached the work.
AEM Platform
The website ran on Adobe Experience Manager 6. Work had to be delivered within the existing component library, with limited scope for design system changes.
Navigation limits
The main navigation could only be modified within existing configuration options - structural redesign was not possible.
Component mismatches
Some available AEM components did not align with desired design system patterns, requiring pragmatic design decisions throughout.
Budget limitations
Minimal changes to the design system were possible, focusing the team on information architecture, content, and template consistency instead.
Rather than treating these as blockers, I used the constraints to focus the team on where we could have the greatest impact: information architecture, content clarity, page structure, template consistency, and task-oriented support journeys.
Discovery: Creating Evidence for Change
The first phase focused on building a clear evidence base. I led the team through a discovery process using a combination of methods.
Tree testing
Competitor analysis
Journey analysis
Usability analysis
Tree testing validated where customers expected to find support information and confirmed significant scope to improve the information architecture. Competitor analysis revealed that effective support experiences were typically more pared back, utilitarian, and task-focused than the existing content. Usability reviews highlighted broken, inconsistent, and unintuitive journeys that made it harder for customers to resolve issues online.
This discovery phase was critical because it gave the team and stakeholders a shared understanding of the problem — moving the conversation away from subjective preferences and toward evidence-based decision-making. The findings led directly to approval for the design and delivery phase.
From Insights to Design Principles
The discovery findings were translated into a set of principles to guide the next phase of work.
1
Easier to navigate - clearer information architecture and consistent structure across business areas
2
Task-focused - support pages designed to help customers complete specific tasks, not browse general information
3
Content simplified - outdated information removed, remaining content made more concise and actionable
4
Distinct from marketing - support pages feel separate from broader product and marketing content
5
Scalable and maintainable - a framework that business units could sustain over time without creating inconsistency
Creating a Scalable Support Framework
A key design decision was to create a new set of support page templates across different page levels. This improved consistency and created a clearer distinction between support content and other website content.
The templates were designed to help customers understand where they were, what options were available, and how to complete the next step. They also gave Aviva a more maintainable framework for future support content, reducing the likelihood that business units would continue creating inconsistent page structures over time.
Early concepts were tested with users and refined based on feedback. We worked closely with design, content, and AEM platform teams to ensure the proposed templates were aligned with the design system, technically feasible, and realistic to build within the existing component library
Aligning Across Business Units
The support experience cut across multiple business areas, so alignment was a major part of the work. We conducted detailed requirements analysis with stakeholders from each business area to confirm which support information needed to be included, which content was outdated, and where consolidation was possible.
Content writers from our team worked closely with Aviva's content team to simplify support information and ensure it met brand and quality standards. Significant effort went into making the content more concise, useful, and easier for customers to understand.
We also agreed a new URL structure that reflected the updated information architecture while taking SEO considerations into account - requiring close collaboration between design, content, business, and platform stakeholders.
Impact
The work improved the discovery, navigation, and consistency of the support content — helping customers find key information more easily and creating a stronger foundation for digital self-service.
Early measurements indicated the new support content was beginning to achieve the intended goal of increasing digital self-service and reducing call centre demand.
Discovery created enough confidence to secure approval for implementation - followed by approval for a wider rollout across remaining business units.
New page templates and a validated information architecture gave Aviva a maintainable model for improving support journeys over time.
Discovery findings shifted stakeholder conversations from subjective preferences to shared, evidence-based decision-making across the programme.
Reflection
One of the most important lessons from the project was the impact of team composition. In the early phases, there were challenges that made delivery harder than it needed to be. As I was able to grow the team and bring in the right mix of skills, the quality, pace, and confidence of the work improved significantly.
For a programme that spans design, content, technology, operations, and multiple business units, team shape is not an operational detail.
It is a strategic success factor. If I were doing this again, I would push to get the right people involved earlier.
My contribution
Project leadership
Discovery
Stakeholder alignment
IA & content strategy
Team building
Senior reporting
Collaborators
Design & Content Team
UX design, content writing & IA
AEM Platform Team
Technical feasibility & component delivery
Client Business Units
Requirements, content sign-off & go-live
Website Product Owners
Design approvals and content production
Methods Used
Tree testing
Competitor analysis
Journey analysis
Usability analysis
Requirements workshops
Content strategy
IA design
Usability testing
Stakeholder presentations
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Oscar Choi
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