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Best practice: Life events are easy for your members to understand and highlight the key stages of a member's pension journey. Complexity is avoided in this first step. PFZW's website starts with 14 member journeys. Most are life and career events.

Practice to avoid: The plan below highlights four retirement stages and explains why they matter in plain language, which is good. However, the broader retirement journey is a sub-optimal starting point. Where does a member go if they had a divorce or a family member dies? These life events could apply to multiple categories below.

Idea: The navigation menu on SHEPP's website opens with life events and different career stages. The menu header descriptions avoid legalese.

Practice to avoid: Most pension websites frustrate members because the starting point isn't clear. The homepage overwhelms them with information, and introduces acronyms and legalese.

Practice to avoid: Where does a member go if they had a divorce in the example below? Do they need to identify what plan they belong to or where they are in their career?

In this example, the member can find divorce information via the 'mid-career' option or search the website for answers.

Idea: In the example below, a PFZW member wants to know more about retirement. For all life events, their website will prompt the member to provide information by asking one simple question at a time. The first question isn't "What plan do you belong to?" Life events are the starting point. A subsequent question is, "When were you born?" to deduce what plan they belong to.

Idea: Wisconsin ETF's homepage provides easy, searchable member access to information on benefits. Their usability tests showed this was a pain point for members prior to their website rebuild.

Best practice: If life and career events are not the starting point in the body of your website, they should be clearly visible in your primary navigation menu as one of the first headers.

Practice to avoid: Don't include information for all life events and member types on a single landing page. You will frustrate the member with too much irrelevant information.

Best practice: OPTrust describes what you need to know, the process, when to contact them, forms and provide other information for each of their life events.

Best practice: Members should be able to find information online. You should be careful not to frustrate your members with rules and pension legalese. Good plans figure out how to present complex information in a simple way.

Idea: You may want to withhold some information from your members to protect them from making sub-optimal decisions on their own, but ideally all information should be available online.

That said, some issues, like taxes, family law or survivor benefits, may be better discussed in person. Your self-service channels should direct members to the appropriate service channel. We have highlighted an example in the red box below.

Best practice: Encourage self-service. Whenever you can redirect your members to the secure member area, tell them why they should. With a life or career website structure, you can describe what members can do online themselves (e.g., "check whether your partner will receive a survivor's pension" or "register your partner"). It is good practice to highlight key calls to action with color - the dark blue button below.

Idea: LAPP has a great educational video series for members. The material is presented so that it is easy to understand. Click on the video below to see how "Benny, LAPP’s pension guru, takes you on a quick tour of the LAPP website to learn where you can find everything you will ever need to know about your pension no matter where you are in your journey."