Aviva had already launched Future State, a market-leading digital experience for members of its Bulk Purchase Annuity Defined Benefit (DB) schemes, built and validated by Studiomade in an earlier phase of work. As an extension to this, our team supported Aviva with expanding on the proposition, in order to help Aviva members whose former workplace schemes allowed for their DB and Defined Contribution (DC) pots to be managed together. Members could already view their DB pension in one place and their DC pot in another, the proposition opportunity was to bring the two together in a single, readily understandable view.
This mattered because managing both pensions as one opens up a valuable option: taking as much of the Pension Commencement Lump Sum (tax-free cash) as possible from the DC pot, while preserving the full value of the guaranteed DB income. To make confident retirement decisions, members needed to see both policies side by side and clearly understand the choices available to them. Studiomade and Aviva’s objective was to shape that proposition and find a way of explaining it that a member with no financial background could genuinely understand and trust.
Our role
Studiomade returned to lead this proposition project across four clear stages. We started with audit and strategy, working through Aviva’s own product complexity, defined benefit rules, defined contribution flexibility, tax free cash allowances, commutation factors, until we understood it to the same level as their internal teams, and used that understanding to define the strategy for how two linked but distinct pensions should sit within a single journey.
From there we moved into user flows and messaging, translating that strategy into wireframes built around real member scenarios, mapping exactly where a member needed to see their DB pension, their DC pot, or both together to make an informed decision. Next came product prototyping, exploring how to present two policies under one wrapper without collapsing their important differences, and building the centrepiece of the experience: an interactive projection tool letting members see how their income and lump sum would change at different retirement ages. Finally, every stage was tested and validated with real people, not signed off internally, so the strategy, the flows and the prototype were all shaped by evidence before a single line of it was built.
Aviva’s team told us afterwards that what they valued most was Studiomade acting as a critical friend throughout, an agency able to get up to speed on genuinely complex financial regulation quickly, then bring an expert, outcome focused point of view back to the table, challenging assumptions where needed rather than simply executing a brief. That showed up directly in the two rounds of user testing we ran.
Our comprehensive testing proved that users loved the projection tool, calling it the most valuable and engaging part of the whole experience, but told us the fixed retirement age options felt too rigid, and we recommended a continuous slider instead. Testing also surfaced a real risk: the message that DB and DC pensions had to be considered together was, in its first form, easy to mistake for routine housekeeping. We pushed for stronger visual weight and clearer warning styling at every decision point, not just once, and recommended writing abbreviations like DB, DC and TFC out in full throughout, since even financially confident users were tripped up by the shorthand.
Designing for trust as well as clarity
Because this proposition sits inside a regulated pension journey, the language and design decisions had to do more than communicate well, they had to hold up as compliant, transparent and supporting customers to make the right decisions. We treated every warning, every disclosure of risk, and every point where a member might misunderstand a guaranteed figure versus a projected one as a moment that needed to build belief, not just convey information, distinguishing clearly between what Aviva guarantees and what is an estimate, and signposting independent financial advice at the points members told us they wanted it most.
The outcome
We delivered a fully validated, tested prototype and Figma component library for the proposition, along with a complete report of findings from both rounds of testing and a handover session to transfer that knowledge directly to Aviva’s own teams, who are now building the linked DB&C experience from our designs. As one senior stakeholder, Robert Pell put it in our client feedback, Studiomade continues to help Aviva ‘accelerate and improve the proposition design process’. The result is a genuinely new capability for Aviva’s members: a way to understand, with confidence, that the pension they already have can work harder for them, without ever feeling like they are being sold something they don’t understand.