Client: Nationale-Nederlanden
Year: 2023
Context & Challenge
In a highly regulated financial environment, Nationale-Nederlanden’s pension portal suffered from low user engagement and trust gaps. Users often believed they were contributing regularly („I pay monthly”) while the portal’s data suggested missed or irregular contributions — creating confusion and reducing confidence.
The platform also failed to motivate users to return — many profiles were incomplete, and users saw little ongoing value in logging in. These friction points significantly impacted communication, account activation, and retention.
My Role
As the lead designer, I was responsible for end-to-end UX leadership throughout the project. I worked closely with:
- Product Owners – aligning design direction with business priorities
- Legal Teams – ensuring compliance and guiding messaging
- Analysts & Testers – identifying pain points and validating improvements
- Developers – introducing the redesigned experience and supporting implementation
I facilitated collaboration across stakeholders, balancing regulatory constraints with user-centered improvements.
Research & Insights
We began with a comprehensive UX audit and a round of user interviews to identify pain points and validate assumptions. Our findings uncovered key issues:
- The onboarding and registration process was too lengthy, leading to drop-offs.
- After login, users struggled to understand their current status — key actions and financial details were either unclear or buried.
- There was a persistent trust gap — users believed they were paying regularly, but the data told a different story.
These insights guided a phased redesign, starting with the registration flow to reduce friction and clarify expectations. Simultaneously, we reimagined the user profile page — not just listing pension contributions, but visualizing key data and creating space for upcoming features like automatic payments. This future-oriented design allowed us to make meaningful improvements now while setting the stage for scalable enhancements later.
Design & Solution
Our primary design strategy was to simplify the user experience by establishing a clear content hierarchy and eliminating unnecessary cognitive load. The original portal overwhelmed users with excessive instructions and scattered information — forcing them to interpret too much at once.
By stripping away non-essential content and guiding the user with contextual, next-step messaging, we made the registration process more intuitive and easier to complete.
Key contributions included:
- Redesigning the user profile page to visually highlight pension data and next actions
- Creating clean, focused UI flows with simplified language and minimal distraction
- Prototyping the full experience — from onboarding to account dashboard
- Adding accessibility markers and annotations during developer handoff to support WCAG compliance
These improvements didn’t just modernize the interface — they restructured the journey to be more proactive, transparent, and prepared for future platform expansion.
Results & Impact
The redesigned experience led to immediate, quantifiable improvements. Within the first day of launching the new registration flow, we observed a 30% increase in completed registrations — a direct result of simplifying the process and clarifying user guidance.
In the newly designed user profile section, we tracked both time spent on page and profile completion rates, which also saw a significant lift. Users not only engaged longer but were more willing to input missing data — a critical improvement for communication and service personalization.
These changes created a foundation for long-term evolution: the streamlined design supported upcoming features like automatic payments, and the inclusion of accessibility markers ensured future development adhered to WCAG standards.
This project proved that clarity, hierarchy, and collaboration — not complexity — are the key to meaningful digital transformation, even within strict legal and regulatory constraints.
