Capita / Pfizer - online pension modeller

When Pfizer planned to make changes to their company pension arrangements, they knew how important is was for employees to be able to quickly visualise and understand this important financial information. To help, Rckt created an accurate yet stunningly easy to use online pension modelling tool.

With many variables affecting how much an employee will earn on their retirement, including past contributions, future contributions and retirement age, it isn’t easy for the average employee to work out what their pension contributions will actually mean when they come to retire.

Pfizer’s service provider Capita Hartshead approached Rckt to create an online financial modeller to not only put the whole pension modelling system on the web, but do it in a user friendly and accessible way. Oh, and to build, test and launch it within two weeks.

The resulting applications allow users to experiment with their retirement age by simply adjusting a slider, and visualising what effect this will have on their income via animated graphs. The tool is build entirely in standards compliant HTML and Javascript, so it can easily be updated in the future should any details of the model change.

A great deal of thought went into the design and build of the tool to ensure it follows best usability and Human Computer Interface theory, such as suggesting affordances rather than giving error message. For example only retirement ages which are available to the user based on their date of birth are displayed, rather than allowing the user to make a selection which would otherwise give an error message.

There is even an automatic print-friendly view, for users who wish to keep a copy of their pension details for future reference.