Scottish Widows

Scottish Widows has been around for over 200 years, but as recently as 2023 the business was still entirely phone and callback-led, with no way to actually buy a pension, investment or protection product online. The public website reflected that: a legacy brochure site built to support conversations with an adviser, not to sell anything itself, running on a design system that hadn't been touched since the site's original build in the early 2000s. One line from user testing summed it up better than I ever could: “the 90s called. They want their UI back.”

Outcome: Rebuilt Scottish Widows' public site design system from the ground up and shipped it as the foundation for the group's first direct-to-consumer journey, spanning pensions, investments and protection.

Building a system that could actually scale

When I joined, the public site's design system was a leftover from its original early-2000s build, and it showed. The brand had moved on, the business had moved on, but the components hadn't. There was no designer working on the public-facing site. Pages were being built by marketing teams pulling from a library that had grown unchecked: one component alone had ballooned to over a hundred variants, with no logic governing when to use what. The result was a site that looked different on every page and couldn't keep up with the products the business was now trying to sell directly for the first time.

That was the gap I stepped into. The job wasn't just restyling what existed, it was giving the public site a design-led point of view it had never had. I rebuilt the component library from the ground up, restyling existing components and introducing new ones where the old system had nothing to offer, all tied into the group's centralised design system rather than built in isolation. Every component came with rules for how it behaved across the three page types that structure the public site (product, comparison and informational), so the system could absorb new product launches without fragmenting each time. Alongside the components, I translated the new Scottish Widows brand out of static guidelines and into something tangible: a unified UI/UX brand book for the public site, covering component restrictions, copy length, iconography and best-in-class examples of how things should look and feel.

The shift wasn't cosmetic. It moved the public site from market-led, where pages were assembled from whatever was available, to design-led, where there was a system, a rationale and a single point of accountability for how the brand showed up online.

Putting the system to work

The component library was the foundation, but a design system only earns its keep when it unlocks things the old approach couldn't. Once the system was in place, two things became possible.

The first was content and SEO done properly. The public website system gave every page type a templating structure with SEO and GEO considerations baked in, not bolted on after the fact. The Stocks & Shares ISA redesign is the clearest example: a full product page following that structure, with content hierarchy, user mental models and search best practice working together rather than pulling in different directions. That page became the reference point for every product page that followed.

The second was experimentation. I rethought how Ready-Made Investments customers see their money grow. The existing graph was a static snapshot. I prototyped an investment calculator that let people watch in real time what leaving money sitting in cash was costing them against investing it, pitched as a conversion play driven by UX rather than marketing. Built in Highcharts, it demonstrated adaptability across systems and plug-ins and showed what the design system could unlock when paired with the right tooling.

Testing, learning, iterating

Towards the end of my tenure I led the group's first Adobe Target experiments on the public site: live variant tests and a full landing-page takeover. The goal was straightforward: take the components and page structures we'd built and start understanding how they resonated with real customers. For a business this size, the first live test on the public site is a genuine unlock. It shifts the conversation from “we think this works” to “here's what the data says,” and it's what makes every experiment after it easier to greenlight.

Where it landed

The rebuilt design system is live and in production across the public site. But the real outcome isn't the system itself, it's what changed because of it. A site that was market-led and assembling pages from a hundred-variant free-for-all now has a coherent design language, a scalable structure and a rationale behind every decision. New product pages across pensions, investments and protection ship faster and more consistently than the old page-by-page approach ever allowed. And a 200-year-old, phone-only business now has its first real direct-to-consumer front door: a brand that holds together, a UX that holds up under scrutiny and a system built to keep scaling as more products land, without needing someone to babysit every page.