So what does it do, again?

This product aggregates all administrative aspects of a retirement plan, such as participation rates, rates of employees maximizing company match, rate of employees who have taken loans against the retirement fund, etc. Retirement plan has been one of the key benefits that employees look for. This tool was intended to help increase the overall health of the retirement plan by presenting various data, which in turn empowers sponsors to take action on. These data are also compared against market benchmark to give the sponsors a better understanding on how their retirement plan stacks up against other companies.

How do you show data?

One of the challenges in this project was displaying a vast amount of data. There was a fair amount of internal friction on how the data are shown. Internally, many of the stakeholders were gravitating towards an “eye candy” version with colorful charts and graphs. Upon conducting research, it was clear that while charts and graphs were visually enticing, delivery of information was extremely poor. None of the participants understood what was going on. Looking pretty does not equate to being user friendly.

Ultimately, I was able to convince the stakeholders to use a clean, straight forward approach. While it may not be as visually exciting as the other, it conveyed the information without need for further interpretation. I believe this is very critical in user experience. If users have to make an attempt to interpret what is presented to them, it is a failed user experience. Above screens show 2 flavors of the dashboard, one with benchmarking and another without.