Kiwisaver: From complex to clear
A usability-driven route to financial information that works for readers
In this session we’ll share an inspirational success story about usability for financial information documents. In 2012–2013, document specialists from Write Limited worked on a landmark project in New Zealand’s communications history. Our writers and document assessors transformed a body of complex financial information into a document that real readers could read and understand. The document is the ANZ Bank’s KiwiSaver Investment Statement and it’s the first KiwiSaver investment statement to achieve the WriteMark Plain English Standard.
KiwiSaver is a retirement savings scheme open to all — the audience for a KiwiSaver investment statement audience is vast. The ANZ Bank document would be mailed to over 200,000 existing customers and viewed by many more, so the stakes were high.
We’ll show how using a combined approach of user-testing and assessing against an elements-based quality standard helped to create a document that was clear, concise, and accessible.
The pull factors — and the challenges we overcame
Conditions for the project were favourable — the client was determined to lead the field in the changing climate of financial information in New Zealand. Recent regulatory changes supported the drive for clarity.
But as with any major project we had challenges to overcome. We’ll examine some of these — to do with the client, their advisors, and the business processes they followed, as well as with the content itself and making that content work for the target audience.
What you’ll take away from the presentation
The project included a range of measures for determining success and monitoring return on investment. We’ll report on these measures so that you can take away constructive ideas for building accountability into a document project.