Bjørn Martin Saastad

EMPLOYER
KLP

DISCIPLINE
UI/UX Design & UX Research

CASE
Imagine what redesigning the websites of Norway's 5th largest company engaging in pension, banking, funding and insurance would look like together with a team of 3 people during a few months isolated during lockdown. We did all of the work, a complete overhaul, all by ourselves with minimal to completely no form of management. Take a moment and let it sink in how big of an accomplishment that is. We are talking a corperation with 1000 employees, 4 daughter companies, 100s of webpages optimised for desktop, tablet and mobile. Sounds hard?

You can bet your life on it.

We managed the impossible.

This is what hard feels like.

It's the hardest thing I've had to do in my design career so far, and just one of a million things I did during my 3¼ years as the only UI Designer at KLP. This project presentation showcases a handfull of them.

In addition to redesigning KLP.no in its entirety with the design team, I did strategic and UX research backed design solutions across the entire digital product and service portfolio for the members and clients, who make up one third of the country's population. I also maintained the visual profile, KLP's brand and ensured everything was fulfilling WCAG/UU requirements across all digital solutions on all platforms for a comprehensive, consistent and good user experience. As a part of maintaining all existing and future designs, and following best practises I delivered clear UI guidelines to front-end developers and followed up throughout the development phase, so that design solutions could be produced and the design system be kept up to date at all times.

Demo Videos

Below you can see demonstration videos I made on Pensjonsveilederen (pension guide), a sick leave calculator and Min Side that got used internally and externally. The last video showcasing both Min Side and Pensjonsveilederen had a deciding factor on a tender in a whole municipality. My video made them pivot towards KLP and decide to become members, which made KLP a whole lot of $$$.

UX Research

A few months before the world wide COVID outbrak I did the most comprehensive and the best UX research done in the company's history, carried out completely independently by a colleague and myself. All of the data found in our research laid the foundation for everything that was and still is prioritized in the department today, broke new records for KPIs, customer satisfaction and lifted KLP's websites to a level they had never been at before.

Flick through the slides of our keynote presented for the whole company below:

I can't share too many details since I signed an NDA. But I will mention user satisfaction was declining from 2016 until it bottomed out in 2019, when I got hired at the company. It then started reversing in 2020 and onwards. KLP's UU (User Accessibility) score in Siteimprove was sitting at 65,4% before my UX research. After key improvements and strategic work to solve the root causes of all issues found during the research process presented in the keynote above, we achieved a whopping 94% across the entire webspace of KLP.no. I don't know about you, but that calls for cake in my ears.

Alerts

Here are some examples of how daily design tasks looked like during my time in the corporate cubicle.

In addition to new alerts I wrote page upon page with guidelines and documentation in Confluence on how to implement them and how they work to make onboarding for new consultants as easy as possible.

Icons & Min Side + Menu

Corporate hired around 100 consultants from Accenture, from all around the world to work in-house so they could upgrade and build a lot of back-end. It was highly needed, as it was old as funk. This meant many things, and one of them was that Min Side (My Account), needed a complete redesign. As I was sitting at my desk I began drawing how that new interface could look like. One of the ideas was a dashboard where the user could track the most important info like current funds in their bank account and how many years they had been saving up pension.

But what if the user wanted to go more in depth, like accessing an overview of current loans or reported insurance claims directly from a menu? I drew inspiration from how some creatives like developers and designers move their task bar to the left or the right in the OS. It would stand out from the rest of the grid and act like a separate OS or Picture-in-Picture of some sort where the user could get into the nitty gritty fast and easy. To figure out which tasks to prioritize we did some user testing, looked at Siteimprove and Google Analytics, but I'll get into that at some point later.

The point I'm trying to get to is that this fabulous menu needed some icons, and we didn't have them. We had some tiny, very minimal icons and some pictograms that could have worked if they could be scaled down to a different size and still retain the clarity of what they were meant to depict, but they didn't and so I got another amazing idea. What if I took inspiration from the minimal icons we had and simplified the pictograms down to a level so they could be used as icons in medium size? I started tracing and reducing the level of detail in the pictograms we would need for the menu and this is how the medium icon set was born.

Min Side menu, made single handedly from scratch.

I also designed the whole Min Side page, where the menu is being used.

Updated and current link cards including product cards inspired by my original design to be used on the front page of KLP.no

Here are some details from the design system I've worked with and helped adjusting.

All the versions of the main menu on klp.no that I made and worked with during my time there, in chronological order.

Conceptual member check component to be used on public webpages where the user doesn't need to log in.

Animations I helped implement:

Here's the whole website after the redesign based on my UX research.

Design System

In addition to redesigning the whole website I made some conceptual designs on how design.klp.no could look like when made public as it currently lives on Storybook and is only accessible to KLP developers and designers.

Experimenting with dark, light and super light mode.

DSOP

I got tasked to make the first prototype of the DSOP (Digtal Samordningsplattform) float at KLP. What the hell does that even mean? It's a big deal. You see, formerly KLP members had to parttake in a tedious and long mail correspondance (the kind you put in an envelope and deliver at your local post office) to file a claim for uførepensjon (disability pension) and a person at KLP had to review and answer all the mail manually. There even is a medical doctor involved in the process and it could take months before it all concluded in an approval or denial.

This is where I came in. I can't really remember the details about who pushed this new tech or where it came from. Could be from KS, Altinn or NAV. It certainly was a collaboration between these three entities and KLP got involved, but who cares. DSOP makes it possible to make a digital platform where all of the info required could be collected within seconds digitally and most of the decision making would be done by the system, highlighting missing info or crucial data points. I was set out to make the first version of how the process would look like from the only point of view that mattered — the user. After a dozen meetings between the case managers, project lead, stakeholders, probably some others and me, we finally decided to hand over a version the developers could use to put this schmanzy tecc into production. Ultimately DSOP makes the lives of the end user and case managers much easier and better after all.

You can view the final prototype that got handed over for development on InVision here:

DSOP - Uføreytelser v4 @ InVision