True Pension Balance

In Q2 2023, Sun Life added mobile support to Choices Wealth Transfer, the platform where members self-serve the movement of their pension assets. It didn't go well. Conversion dropped. Bounce rates climbed. User feedback kept saying the same two things: people were confused, and they didn't trust what they were looking at. I led the redesign end to end, working across product, tech, and business to figure out what broke and fix it.

One quarter after launch: 51% conversion increase, $100M in sales targets surpassed, and SUM Score up from 85.4% to 95.7%. Here's how we got there.

The mobile integration broke something at almost every step. The numbers showed the drop. Talking to real users told us why.

What the Data Showed

• Conversion rates dropped from 27% in Q1 2023 after the mobile integration in Q2.
• Bounce rates went up. People were landing on the page and leaving before doing anything.
• Showing investment options one at a time, each on its own screen, caused people to freeze up before they even reached the enrolment step.

What Users Told Us

• Most users had no idea Choices Wealth Transfer applied to them until several screens in. The landing page used the product's internal name and assumed people would know what it meant. They didn't.
• Nobody could see their unlocked pension amount until after they'd already enrolled. In sessions, people described it as being asked to sign something before reading it. That came up constantly as the reason they left.
• Each investment option lived on its own screen. People kept going back to compare, losing track of what they'd seen, and most couldn't remember the details from two screens ago by the time they had to choose.

The Lean Value Proposition Canvas revealed something we didn't expect. The business thought users needed education before they'd convert. Research told a different story. People who arrived at the platform had already made up their minds to transfer. They didn't need more information. They needed enough confidence to go through with it. That one shift changed everything about how we designed.

The Discovery Approach

• A Lean Value Proposition Canvas got 12 stakeholders aligned and changed the question we were designing for, from 'how do we educate users' to 'how do we give a decided user enough confidence to act.'
• A 6-day cross-functional design sprint gave us three directions to test: a wizard flow, a single consolidated screen, and a calculator-led entry point. The calculator got cut in round 1. People who had already decided to transfer didn't want to be walked through a tool that felt like it was still helping them make up their mind. The wizard tested fine for first-timers but anyone who wanted to compare options non-linearly got stuck.
• Five rounds of testing with real Sun Life members. Between rounds 2 and 3, we moved the unlocked pension amount from after enrolment to the first thing people saw. That one move drove more of the final lift than anything else we changed.

Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Exploration

We turned the sprint outputs into testable flows before touching any visual design. From round 2 on, the single-screen layout beat the wizard every time. People were going back to compare options more than three times per session. The single screen let them do that without losing their place.

The redesign beat every target. Within one quarter of launch, the platform had recovered all the conversion lost after the mobile integration and passed the previous peak by a wide margin. No major campaigns or rate changes happened at the same time, so the design work is the credible explanation for the numbers.

• Showing the unlocked pension amount upfront was the highest-impact decision in the whole project. The business didn't want to do it. Round 2 testing gave us the data to hold that position, and we did.
• Five rounds of testing for a financial flow isn't overkill. Each round found something the previous one missed. The pension unlock move came out of round 2. An edge case in the tooltips that would have confused people at the worst possible moment came out of round 5.

Conversion problems in financial products are almost never about the visuals. They're about the structure. The drop-off here wasn't from bad design aesthetics. It was from a flow that asked people to commit before they understood what they were committing to, and to navigate before they could actually compare anything. Three things fixed it: show the unlocked amount upfront, put all the options in one place, and make the process visible before asking anyone to act. That's what drove the 51% conversion increase and $100M in sales. Not clever interactions. Just clarity.