Legal and General is a leading financial services company with products including investment management, lifetime mortgages, pensions, annuities, and life assurance. As part of its ambition to be the number one retirement brand in the UK, a project was initiated in early 2020 to create new content for the Legal and General website to help people navigate the complex world of later-life care.
It is usually a very stressful time when somebody needs to find later-life care, whether it be for themselves or a loved one, and research suggested that this was often made worse by the difficulty in getting useful and relevant information from the many sources of information out there.
It was hypothesised that by creating a "go-to" website with useful tools and content that helped people understand, find and fund their later-life care, we would in turn create the business benefit of raising awareness and uptake of Legal and General's lifetime mortgage products, which in the right circumstances, can be used to help fund later-life care.
I was the lead UX designer on the team, working with product owners, business analysts, UX and UI designers, developers and subject matter experts. In this role I planned and guided the design phase of the project and was hands-on with most of the UX design, utilising extra resources for user research and testing.
The UK entered Covid-19 lockdown a few days before the first workshop therefore we had to quickly adapt to running everything remotely. With the challenge of keeping participants engaged in remote sessions, along with many in the team also having to deal with urgent Covid-19 issues, we decided to run a series of shorter two-hour sessions for project discovery and definition. This was followed by sessions with a smaller group of people to develop and refine designs. We also worked closely with the Scrum teams during the development phase of the project.
The solution we delivered is a new later-life care section on the Legal and General website that in addition to useful information, also provides:
These features were all aimed at addressing the identified user problems with getting useful later-life care information relevant to their individual circumstances.
During our workshops we worked through ideas on how to address the identified user pain points and provide a differentiated experience from what was out there. We imagined interactive tools that allowed users to enter some basic information about their circumstances which in turn was used to generate personalised guidance.
A popular idea we worked through early in the project was an online account that users could log into to view this personalised guidance and manage their later-life care journey. In addition to useful information, this guidance would include a list of suggested actions (including a status tracker) as well as links to other resources and contacts. This idea was quickly mocked-up and was well received, however it was determined that it would be too complicated and costly to build for the business benefits the project was expected to provide. We therefore scaled back the functionality so that the tools still provided personalised guidance, but without the extra features that needed an online account to access and manage.
We worked through a number of design iterations to refine the flow, interactions and content layout of these tools and regularly tested for discoverability, usability, and usefulness.
For the Care Cost Calculator tool, the results page was particularly important to get right as it contains important information on whether a funding shortfall is expected and what their options are to plug it if so. This in turn, is directly linked to the business objective of the project to raise awareness and uptake of Legal and General's lifetime mortgage products.
We tested several design variants of this results page, looking at user's reactions to the information presented to them, it's usefulness, and what their likely next actions would be.
Given the difficulties users were having with gathering relevant later-life care information from different sources we paid particular attention to our information architecture so that our content was as easy to navigate as possible. Our initial version of the information architecture was informed by an open card sort and then refined over multiple iterations using tree tests.
Our later-life care section was essentially a website within a website and this meant we were placing content further down in the site's page hierarchy than the existing navigation menu catered for. Redesigning this menu would have been hugely complicated given the potential impact on the rest of the site so we decided to instead create an additional "sub-navigation menu" to work in conjunction with the existing one.
In order to inform our designs we looked at a number of other websites with similar navigation challenges. Our designs were put into an Axure prototype which was then tested and refined for discoverability and usability.
The solution we delivered provides a user-friendly way for people to find useful and relevant later-life care information in a single location. The interactive tools we have built provide an easy way for people to understand the care options available to them, find care providers, and also understand how the care can be funded.
With user research highlighting in particular how important it is for users to understand how much the care will cost and how they can pay for it, our care costs calculator is a key value-add differentiator. After the user enters some basic information about their financial circumstances, the tool provides a useful summary that includes the average cost of care in the specified area and any potential funding shortfall. If a shortfall is predicted then the tool will let the user know what options they have to plug this shortfall based on the information they provided.
Even though the main business benefit of the project is to increase awareness and uptake of Legal and General's lifetime mortgage products, our website is intended to be useful to anybody needing help with their later-life care journey regardless of whether they are a potential lifetime mortgage customer or not.
The way projects were approved and funded at Legal and General at the time meant that the design team was engaged later than we would have liked. It meant that the early generative user research was done before we joined the project by people outside of the design team. It was therefore prudent to validate some of the assumptions underpinning the project hypotheses.
To do this, we added some extra questions to some user testing we were running. For example, in our card sorts and tree tests, we also asked users to rank in order of priority a list of key considerations when looking for later-life care. We ran these tests several times and the results consistently showed that understanding the cost of care and how to fund it, along with getting personalised care guidance were the most important considerations. Thankfully these results supported our project hypotheses and getting these results early meant we could proceed with added confidence.
The sudden change to fully remote working due to Covid-19 lockdown was made even more difficult with restrictions on what collaboration software we could use. We planned on using Miro, an excellent online collaboration tool, however we were informed a day before the workshop that we could not use Miro as it was not approved for use beyond the design team.
This meant that we had to quickly switch and make use of the Office 365 suite as best we could as it was the only viable option for us. We quickly refamiliarised ourselves with PowerPoint, tested its online collaboration features, and recreated templates. These templates were far from polished but they did the job and were refined on subsequent projects.
Given the challenges thrown up by Covid-19, I am very proud of the fact that we delivered the project on-time, and what we delivered was true to the vision of the project. With that being said, here are some things I would do differently next time.
As mentioned earlier, the way projects were approved and funded meant that the early generative user research was done by non-specialists outside of the design team. While we did our best to mitigate this issue during this project, it would simply be more efficient and effective to involve the design team from the beginning so we can take the project all the way end to end from early user research to final delivery. I raised this with our design director and he said that it was a known issue and that he and other senior leaders were working on a different model for the business to engage the design team.
The challenges thrown up by Covid-19 meant that in the early stages of the project we were a little reactionary which impacted our workshop planning and subsequent collaboration sessions. One thing I didn't do particularly well was properly explain the design process and this did cause a little friction at times as a there were a few people who hasn't gone through the design process before and weren't expecting to be so directly involved in some of the exercises. If I had my time again I would better explain the process, why we are doing it and what outcomes are expected.
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