Aware Super · Senior Product Designer (Contract) · Nov 2025 – Jun 2026
Nothing could look like advice.
A self-service retirement income product for Australia's third-largest super fund, where the thing members needed most was the one thing regulation wouldn't let us give them.
The setup
Most Australians retire without ever seeing a financial adviser. Advice is expensive, adviser numbers have fallen, and funds are under pressure to help members anyway. Aware Super's answer was a self-service retirement income product: members should be able to understand and act on retirement decisions on their own, from the product itself.
I joined the cross-functional squad as the designer, working alongside a product manager and engineers, designing within the fund's design system from first concepts through to production handover.
The problem
People understand retirement products through worked examples: "someone like you, with a balance like yours, might draw down like this." But under Australia's financial advice regulation, an example that maps too closely to a member's own situation stops being general education and starts being personal advice: something a fund can't deliver through a product screen without an adviser behind it.
In enterprise terms: every screen we designed needed legal and risk sign-off, and the single fastest way to fail that gate was to be helpful in the wrong way.
What I did
The usual enterprise pattern is escalation: design something, submit to legal, get it rejected, water it down, repeat. That cycle produces the hedge-everything screens that make members give up and call the contact centre. That was the exact cost the product was meant to remove.
I brought legal and risk in from early concepts and changed the question from "can we ship this?" to "where exactly is the line?" Once the line was explicit, it became a design constraint like any other. We landed on sample scenarios and interactive tools: scenarios that were clearly and deliberately not the member, and tools where the member changes the inputs themselves, so any conclusion is one they reached, never one we directed them to.
Alongside that, I designed a dashboard bringing balance, income projections, investments, assets and liabilities into one view, and shaped how the product's AI-generated outputs were presented: what the AI drew on, what it could and couldn't say, and where its boundary with advice sat.
Testing shaped the rest of it. Early usability rounds had a consistent refrain: overwhelming. Not confusing, not broken. Too much, for a decision that already carries weight. A less experienced version of me would have added explanations. Instead we cut, every round: fewer numbers on the default view, fewer choices at once, more progressive disclosure, until "overwhelming" stopped appearing in the transcripts.
The outcome
The product went to production handover within Aware's design system, with the scenario framing and AI presentation patterns intact after legal and risk review, not diluted by it. The compliance constraint is permanent; the design showed it doesn't have to cost members clarity.
