MoneySmart

MONEYSMART, ASIC

Reimagining retirement planning for Australians through MoneySmart

ASIC engaged Wave to reimagine the MoneySmart retirement experience, transforming complex, emotionally charged retirement planning into a clear, supportive digital journey Australians could trust.

I led experience strategy and product design across discovery, testing, and MVP definition, working closely with ASIC stakeholders to shift the platform from a static, content-heavy site to a journey-based Retirement Hub grounded in real life stages, behaviours, and needs. The outcome was a validated MVP experience, a future-state vision, and a multi-year roadmap aligned to government standards and delivery realities.

Role

Strategic Design Lead
Organisation
WAVE Design Agency
Client
ASIC — MoneySmart
Focus
Experience strategy, product design, government digital services, financial wellbeing

“Thanks Lucy! It’s been another massive week and the work is outstanding. Thanks so much.”

–Stakeholder feedback
The challenge
Australians are living longer and retiring in more varied ways, yet many feel overwhelmed, uncertain, or unprepared when navigating retirement decisions. While MoneySmart is a trusted source of financial guidance, its retirement content was fragmented and didn’t reflect how people actually think about retirement, as a series of transitions, not a single event.

The challenge was both structural and emotional:
  • Users struggled to know where to start or what applied to them
  • Retirement tools felt intimidating when presented out of context
  • Internal teams needed clarity on how to evolve the experience within strict regulatory, accessibility, and digital standards

“Lucy is a full-package designer — highly creative, strategically minded, and deeply user-centred in her approach.

–WAVE feedback
My role & responsibilities
As Strategic Design Lead, I:
  • Led cross-functional discovery and ideation workshops with ASIC SMEs to define the strategic foundation for the experience
  • Synthesised extensive existing research alongside new qualitative insights
  • Defined a new multi-sided digital experience spanning diverse life stages and user mindsets
  • Designed and facilitated iterative user testing to validate concepts, language, and sequencing
  • Drove alignment across design, product, content, and engineering to ensure MVP feasibility
  • Mentored designers to maintain pace, quality, and stakeholder confidence
  • Embedded lean experimentation practices across the sprint lifecycle
  • Applied AI to accelerate synthesis, prototyping, and content iteration
Approach & thinking
We began by synthesising more than ten existing research artefacts from ASIC and partners to establish shared understanding of user needs, emotions, and decision points. This revealed that people experience retirement as a phased journey, from early curiosity, to preparation, to active retirement.

From there, the approach focused on:
  • Reframing retirement as a journey, not a binary milestone
  • Designing scenario-based entry points grounded in real life situations
  • Shifting from content-first to journey-led information architecture
  • Rapid prototyping and iterative testing to de-risk early assumptions
  • Prioritising clarity, accessibility, and emotional reassurance for users with low financial literacy
AI-assisted content generation and prototyping were used to test language, empty states, and early UI concepts quickly, improving comprehension and speeding up iteration.

–MoneySmart super calculator

–Fidelity examples used

–Research activities

–MoneySmart calculator

Outcomes & impact
The engagement delivered clarity and direction for MoneySmart’s retirement experience:
  • Defined a future-state vision for a personalised, journey-based Retirement Hub
  • Delivered a validated MVP experience structured around key retirement life stages
  • Improved clarity, confidence, and usability by surfacing tools in relevant context
  • Established a clear information architecture and navigation model
  • Created a prioritised MVP-to-future-state roadmap supporting incremental delivery
  • Aligned the experience to ASIC’s Digital Experience Framework (DxF) and National Priorities Plan (NPP)
  • Strengthened cross-team alignment around a shared, user-centred vision


“Lucy is simply a wonderful person to work with — proactive, collaborative, and always bringing a positive, can-do attitude. It was an absolute pleasure having her on the team, and I warmly recommend her for any future role or project.

–WAVE feedback

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