Project Overview
UniSuper's mobile application has revolutionised the superannuation industry by providing a unique and delightful user experience that surprises even tech-averse users. The app's success is attributed to UniSuper's human-centered design, which involved careful planning and expert development, as well as the company's focus on its core membership base.
Despite entering the mobile market relatively recently, UniSuper has managed to leapfrog its competition and become the best-rated superannuation application in just one year. Moreover, the app's intuitive and user-friendly design has increased record engagement on mobile, overtaking traditional web platforms.
In 2021, UniSuper opened its doors to all members, not just those in the higher education and research sectors. However, the company's desire to delight its users and utilise human-centered design led to the development of a seamless mobile application that connects financial information and provides a joyful experience for all users.
The flawless customer experience and overall success of UniSuper's mobile app are attributed to the company's design strategy, capability uplift, and scalable design execution. The app's development involved customer research and design-led experience approach and resulted in custom iOS and Android native mobile applications connected to core systems via .NET API hosted on Azure APIM. The entire process, from concept to launch, took only six months.
Organisation
Team
UniSuper Mobile App Team
NCS Group
Project Brief
When UniSuper started their journey, their vision was so much more than just feature parity with their rivals. Instead, they planned to reinvigorate, reinvent and rethink the experience of superannuation apps. In an industry sometimes considered boring and stuck within the status quo, UniSuper wanted to make their application a joyful experience, inclusive and accessible to everyone, revitalising their customer’s engagement and attitude towards their super.
Having just celebrated their 40th anniversary, UniSuper is steeped in tradition. A bold change like this required UniSuper to adapt its approach to become more agile, it required buy-in and belief from its leaders, a desire and willingness to challenge current expectations of superannuation apps, and a partner who could build and deliver this project.
Success was dependent on a deep partnership between UniSuper and NCS. Utilising UniSuper’s knowledge and experience in superannuation, and passion for their customers, and NCS’s long history in developing innovative mobile apps. With this being the first native app release for UniSuper, the client and internal teams were uncertain of the constraints and nuances of an app-led experience, meaning that they had to work closely in partnership to ensure both teams clearly understood the direction in which the app would proceed.
The project brief was to leapfrog the superannuation competition by doing something new - creating an app that delighted its users and breathing a breath of fresh air to the pockets of their more than 620,000 users.
Project Need
In an industry with so many different providers, innovation can be difficult. As a result, the desire for an application that would bring delight needed deep thought to challenge the status quo and shake up the industry.
UniSuper approached this challenge with a change in mindset, rethinking superannuation instead of following in the footsteps of others. Historically a superannuation application would replicate the web functionality. UniSuper based their decisions on research to challenge this assumption by understanding how people’s relationships differ between the web and their phones, and how they could maximise the impact of each piece of functionality in their initial application offering.
The game changer was human centred design, understanding their user base, listening to their experience, and designing the entire application from scratch with user experience at the heart of everything they did. Rethinking the experience yielded incredible results with subtle changes refreshing previously tired functionality. UniSuper understood that research, coupled with technical architecture and design was the key to get it right before writing the first lines of code.
The key underpinning foundation was accessibility. When you design for everyone then everyone reaps the benefits. With NCS’s industry leading experience in the accessibility space they could understand how these concepts could seamlessly fit into the foundations of the project. This was the final measure of success for the UniSuper team - that everyone would be able to use this application, with an optimised experience, no matter who they are.
User Experience
With so many superannuation providers in Australia it would be easy to assume they each face the same problems - the opposite couldn’t be closer to the truth. Due to differences in age, demographic, gender, industry and many other factors, each fund needs to carefully consider the best experience for their members.
For older Australians, a superannuation application has direct implications on their day to day life, rather than their far off future. The right design and user flow would give members an immediate and direct connection to their finances. Giving reassurance and information clearly and quickly.
Unisuper wanted to ensure the app was able to support all digitally engaged members from Day 1, regardless of whether they were just beginning their super journey or into their retirement phase.
The UniSuper design team owned this concept, undertaking research, designing, testing, receiving feedback, and repeating the process until a striking, engaging and intuitive result was uncovered. This clear and easy-to-use layout has positive flow on effects to the entire customer base, guiding all users through the process to stay connected and engaged with their retirement funds.
The stereotype of the older demographic is of people who struggle to use and understand technology. The new UniSuper application turns this on its head. With careful consideration, time and expertise UniSuper have received no app related calls to its call centre, showing that the problem might lie at the feet of the technologists, rather than their users.
Project Marketing
UniSuper knew that its users were at the heart of success for this new mobile platform. Understanding their needs, how they would use the app and how that experience could be improved was vital in building the right product six months before its release. Although design is at the heart of user experience, almost equally important is the responsiveness and architecture of a mobile application - with loading times, crash rates and network errors having a huge impact on how people feel when they put their phones back in their pockets.
UniSuper and NCS worked together to ensure the final product exceeded user expectations. The app's responsiveness was exceptional, with an average response time of 2,652 milliseconds from over 3.7 million Australian requests. The app was stable with almost 100% uptime and was crash-free on Android and 99.5% crash-free on iOS.
Users were highly satisfied with the app, as reflected in their ratings and feedback. The app received 4.7 stars from 1.1K reviews on iOS and 4.7 stars from 400 reviews on Android. The design was praised for being seamless, inclusive, and intuitive.
Since its release, the app has seen exponential growth, with mobile accounting for 48% of all logins. The app's success has also led to an increase in active users, with the desktop members being more active. The app has received over 95k downloads, exceeding original targets.
Project Privacy
UniSuper treats cyber security and digital member safety as one of its top priorities and the company has built its products around this core pillar. UniSuper's technical specialists and leaders understand the importance of people's information and have baked cyber security into the fabric of their new mobile application.
The new application is designed with a range of features to ensure maximum privacy and security. All user information is securely stored and requires authentication to access and perform key functions. UniSuper has also implemented several small but powerful security features that ensure the highest level of privacy.
The security measures of UniSuper extend beyond the user-facing application. The company has put in place stringent measures to ensure the security of requests to fetch user data, information delivery, and the backend where all the information is stored within Australia.
UniSuper recognises that security is not a one-time thing, and hence, security is their top priority even in the ongoing development and improvement stage of the application. The company is constantly designing and reviewing code to meet its exceptionally high standard and keep up with the ever-changing landscape of security.
Digital - Finance
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