Comprehensive platform redesign & brand development
Barnett Waddingham is a leading UK professional services consultancy specialising in risk, pensions, investment and insurance. They came to LION+MASON to transform Choices 4me, their workplace benefits platform, into an experience that worked harder for both the employees using it and the sales team selling it.
The existing benefits platform wasn’t delivering for either audience. For employees, navigating and understanding their workplace benefits was unnecessarily complex. For the sales team, the product lacked the polish and usability needed to win new business with confidence. Barnett Waddingham needed a complete rethink of the employee benefits experience, from the ground up.
A structured end-to-end design process ran across five phases, moving from deep user research through to a fully tested design system. Every decision was grounded in evidence from real users rather than assumptions.
The project opened with a stakeholder workshop to define scope and set the direction for the user research, identifying the platform’s primary users, their typical tasks and priorities. This shaped the recruitment profile and ensured the research was grounded in real user behaviour from the start.
Task-based testing on the existing benefits platform followed, capturing the wants, needs, behaviours and frustrations of employees engaging with workplace benefits day to day. Existing user journeys were mapped, a UX audit of the current platform was carried out, and a competitor analysis of other employee benefits solutions was completed, building a clear picture of where the platform was falling short.
With a solid evidence base in place, we moved into UX design, refining user journeys, simplifying navigation and reducing the overwhelming volume of on-screen content. Re-architecting the information structure was central to this phase, bringing the platform into alignment with how users actually think about and access their benefits. A particular focus was finding the right data visualisation approaches to make complex financial and benefits information feel clear and accessible rather than intimidating. Low-fidelity wireframes were developed in preparation for user testing.
The low-fi prototype was tested remotely with real users, reflecting the environments and devices they actually use. Scenario and task-based testing validated our design thinking, checking comprehension, navigational confidence and overall usability across the redesigned benefits platform. Findings were compiled into a detailed report, shared with key stakeholders, and used to directly inform the high-fidelity design phase.
An art direction workshop brought LION+MASON and the client together to align on visual direction before any UI work began. Brainstorming and dot-voting exercises established shared aesthetic principles around style, tone and mood, feeding directly into moodboards that set the creative foundation for the UI design.
The final phase centred on building a scalable design system using atomic design methodology, giving Barnett Waddingham a flexible, maintainable foundation for their benefits platform going forward. This included a typographic scale for multiple devices, an accessible colour palette, and a centralised component library for both desktop and mobile. Dedicated handover sessions with BW’s internal design team ensured they could confidently own and evolve the system. To strengthen the platform’s commercial appeal, several alternate themes were also developed, demonstrating to prospective clients the full range of customisation the product could offer.
To attract a broader range of businesses, Barnett Waddingham requested from the outset that their new benefits platform be customisable with different themes. The final stage of the project saw LION+MASON developing several alternate themes for the platform, demonstrating the potential options when presenting the product to prospective customers.
The redesigned employee benefits platform had an immediate commercial impact for Barnett Waddingham, giving the sales team a product they could pitch with real confidence.
