One of the benefits of working at ACC is that staff can join mysuper – ACC’s superannuation scheme. The scheme has been running for over 30 years, and traditionally, most staff at ACC were members. However, nowadays many people already have a KiwiSaver scheme, and so mysuper was finding that fewer people were joining their scheme, even though it offered more flexibility and greater benefits than KiwiSaver. In response, mysuper asked Diagram: is our website the problem?

The reason why mysuper was pointing the finger of blame at its website was because it was the primary channel used to acquire new members. New ACC staff were directed to the mysuper website to decide if they wanted to join. The mysuper team was considering redesigning the website in the hope that it would help arrest the decline in membership.

To answer the question, our approach was to interview and survey ACC staff members to understand why they did (or didn’t) join mysuper. We also reviewed the superannuation landscape to understand how mysuper’s features compared. Following this work, we tested some different product names and propositions to find a more effective way to explain how the mysuper scheme worked, and highlight its advantages over KiwiSaver.

After refining the product names - and testing prototypes that visually explained the key differences about where funds were invested, and what funds a person had access to - we realised that the problem was not really the website; it was how the products were explained and positioned.

Instead of spending time and effort on a general website redesign, we directed mysuper towards some specific changes to key areas within the existing website. Whilst a redesign of the entire website might have been nice, reworking the content and product names was what really mattered in terms of mysuper’s business objectives.