Many LGPS funds and employers are looking to invest in digital innovation - not only directly in building software tools and models, but more widely in using those tools and models to digitally transform their entire organisations and interaction with stakeholders.

Many such initiatives are challenging to execute at any time but even more so when the LGPS is so stretched across many competing demands. Having been involved in many transformation projects over the years, there is one fundamental reason that drives projects off the rails - organisations stop listening to their end users and what they need.

Focus on the users

Digital transformation programmes are complex and they can become easily distracted with internal issues such as changing accountabilities and organisational structures, documenting processes, rolling out training and updating old and clunky technology to something newer and shinier. As these concerns get more of the focus, end user interests can appear a secondary concern.

This doesn’t work. Users don’t care if you’ve migrated your database platform from Oracle to Microsoft or vice versa. They don’t care if you’ve appointed a Head of Transformation or that you’ve centralised your data validations team. 

Users care about value delivered. Not just in a financial quantitative sense, but also in more qualitative terms.

Users care about better, faster and more transparent experience. They care about more accurate and quicker decision-making and, in the end, about improving the outcomes for them and their stakeholders. Innovation is necessary for all these things.

So how can you ensure that you’re delivering value through digital? Given such a broad range of options, where do we focus our efforts?

Unsurprisingly, my choice is spending time on improving user experiences (or UX as it’s sometimes referred to). A user-friendly interface, free of jargon, improves ease of use, increases productivity and attracts and retains users. Poor UX and clunky unreliable systems on the other hand, erode trust and results in users failing to adopt technology - falling back on less efficient but trusted traditional methods.

This is particularly crucial in the complex pensions field, where services are under ever-increasing cost pressure and expedient management is essential.

Implementation tips from our evolving experience

The UX specialists in our LGPS digital team employ several specialist methods, but they're all geared around listening carefully to LGPS Officers and really understanding their needs.

This can be done in many ways but, when it comes to building digital solutions, a co-designed approach always yield better results. The closer that software developers and those responsible for service delivery can get to observing real user issues the better.

There are many things you can consider to implement a more user-centred design process to ensure that the needs and perspectives of end-users are always taken into consideration:

• Conduct user research to gain insights into user behaviour and preferences, and to inform design decisions.
• Adopt an iterative design process, incorporating user feedback and testing into each iteration.
• Encourage collaboration between designers, developers, and stakeholders to ensure that everyone is aligned on design goals and objectives.

Discovery workshops can be used to canvass the opinions of users, really understand the problems that confront them every day and collaborate in depth on how you might help improve the UX of our systems.

Without that close collaboration you increase the risk of performing a “lift and shift” transformation, whereby you upgrade an old system by replacing its components with new ones that do the same thing more reliably. Whilst this may improve performance and speed up user interaction with a system, it’s worth investing the time to examine if those processes are still fit for purpose. Afterall, if you improve the performance of a system that is outdated, you simply do that outdated work faster.

Continuous improvement mindset

As the LGPS needs evolve over time, and our services evolve to meet those needs, so must our technology that supports those activities. We therefore see it as imperative that we don’t see this UX focus as a one-off activity, but adopt a continuous improvement mindset – regularly re-evaluating our systems fitness for purpose.

The significance of placing value on User Experience (UX) can't be overstated. We recognise that all our users are more informed than ever on how software supports them. Individuals experience with personal technology such Alexa, Netflix, online grocery shopping and Spotify sets high expectations of the software you use in your professional lives.

Take aways

We would encourage both funds and employers which are looking at digital transformation projects to focus on UX. This will deliver more seamless and efficient experiences by unlocking the full potential of your systems to better meet user needs.

If you have any questions on anything covered in this blog, please get in touch.