Web Development | PensionPro
Project SUMMARY
How can a new sales site template serve the business and their audience? As a frontend designer, I coded custom templates to merge priorities for companies and the people they serve.
Client
PensionPro
My Role
Frontend Developer
Deliverables
Consumer Websites, UX/UI Designs
Background
In 2017, PensionPro expanded its portfolio of products beyond software to offer newsletters and websites to Third Party Administrator (TPA) companies through BENEFIT INSIGHTS. This bundling of products would allow a TPA company to have a cohesive sales site, quarterly communication, and a daily project management platform in one package.
From 2017 to 2019, I was the sole employee of the Benefit Insights project, where I created a combination of templated newsletters and websites to use as examples.
Goals
• Identify usability themes for B2B and B2C users.
• Design a mobile-responsive experience with personalization elements.
• Uncover modular UI components that can be used at-scale.
Methods
As a new product for PensionPro, Benefit Insights did not have a portfolio of work to provide prospective clients. For several months, I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create brand kits for made-up companies to use as examples - GlobalTPA and Total TPA.
Each brand kit had a logo, color palette, and tone of voice. GlobalTPA was based on industry-leading, modern TPA companies. It represented a professional but casual brand identity that spoke to younger firms. TotalTPA was inspired by more corporate, conventional firms with audiences less interested in a captivating web experience. These narratives were used to build four fully functional sales sites, including content writing, responsive design work, and user testing. Click through the four buttons below to view the various template sites.
Rationale
I chose user testing early on in the process because it allowed me to uncover current trends in the TPA industry. By interviewing users before and after launching their new site, I was able to measure satisfaction. More importantly, I was able to conduct real-time user testing on UI components, like FAQ accordions or contribution limit charts, that informed the product roadmap.
Analysis
One of the functional opportunities of purchasing a Benefit Insights’ website was the ability to offer a quarterly newsletter to clients. Benefit Insights had a pre-existing client base that purchased newsletter services, so converting those clients into website customers was a primary goal. However, the process of creating custom-branded newsletters in both HTML and PDF format for a portfolio of clients was time-consuming. A quarterly newsletter launch would take many hours, which would effectively stop other operations. This drop in production led to the question: “How do we create a series of templates and scripts to automate newsletter production?”
Typically, each newsletter would be dropped into the root folder of a client’s website. Afterward, each client’s blog page would be opened, edited with the new line of code, and reuploaded to the server.
I designed the sales page for our product site - Benefit Insights.
Insights
Insight 1
Online Branding Compliments the "Office Experience"
Users wanted a website presence that mirrored the image of their office. This meant that our product offerings had to speak to traditional media formats and more tech-forward personalities. I created personas to match both of these user groups.
Insight 2
The Newsletter is an Entry-Point
TPAs might be using newsletters to gain new business, but in user interviews, it was clear that newsletters were actually serving as a nudge for current customers to revisit their provider's site. This insight led to "baked-in" CTAs in the newsletter to promote a new web resource or online engagement strategy.
Insight 3
Scroll or Explore?
Users were divided on whether their experience should leverage long, content-rich pages, or short, scannable UI. I built out A/B test pages using accordions or tables to see what pages performed better over time.
Conclusions
🟢 High Impact
🤖 A custom script allows HTML newsletters to be customized with the logo and brand of the customer and uploaded to the page in seconds.
This reduced a 40-hour monthly project to 4-hours.
🟢 High Impact
🎨 Instead of recycling the content and color for the templates, I designed four custom brands for the templated products.
In 1:1 sessions, users directly mentioned wanting their brand to match a tone like the "corporate" or "casual" options.
🟢 High Impact
🧩 In moderated testing, users would reveal pain points felt by their customers. For me, it was an opportunity to solve two challenges at once.
Adding accordion containers to two templates allowed users to condense information for FAQ and plan pages.
Limitations
The UX research was done parallel to the design and deployment of the product, which limited the available time to conduct a mixed-methods approach and also limited the validation process.