Educational pension game | Kingfisher

Educating young, unengaged staff on the importance of paying into their pension as early as possible.

The challenge

As the parent company of hardware stores such as B&Q and Screwfix, Kingfisher faced a problem; engaging their 18-25 year old employees with their retirement planning.

With a new government policy of auto-enrolment in pension schemes looming, Kingfisher were keen to reduce opt-outs to a minimum. They engaged financial services specialist agency Teamspirit, where I was working at the time. Our research showed that the target employees were digital natives and a high proportion were keen casual gamers and so we felt that the best solution was an educational game for iPhone and Android.

Our intention was to entertain, but have an underlying message to the game play as well as providing additional information and resources.

Research and concept

With the client on board with the idea of a game as part of the campaign the first step was to choose the game mechanic. We were restricted by the client's budget and needed to ensure that the goal of the game would align with the key message that we needed to communicate.

Researching games in the App Store and Play Store we found that endless runner style games were very popular at the time. This mechanic could easily be used for a 2D platform game, a format which is low effort in terms of development and so would be within budget. We discussed this as a team and felt that adding coin collection to the design created a clear link with putting money into a pension. We decided to have multiple characters of different ages, with the younger characters having an inherent advantage, in order to get across the main message that the younger a person starts to add to their pension the better the result.

I put together some initial sketches of the concept for discussion with the client and the route was agreed.

Design development

With the concept agreed I further developed the game mechanics and storyboarded the progression through the game. Taking inspiration from the hardware products sold by B&Q and Screwfix, I drew all of the illustrations for the game, including the characters, obstacles and 3 layers of parallax backgrounds.

From this core I then expanded my view to the wider app. I wireframed and completed the visual design of all of the other screens for the app. These included a leaderboard to encourage repeat play and competition amongst employees and screens which presented more traditional pension information to users who responded to CTAs throughout the app.

As a team, we then documented the mechanics and requirements for the app and handed this over to a specialist game development company to build.

Build support and testing

Throughout the build I was on hand to support the developers with any requirements they had and provided feedback and direction on the work that they produced. 

As soon as a beta version was available I ran a study with Kingfisher employees. As a result of observing the behaviour of employees with the app I made some adjustments to the game. I had thought that the underlying message of the game was a little too obvious and lacking in subtlety, but through the testing I realised that this was just my perspective from being heavily involved with it and so I added a few more details to make it clearer.

Other aspects of the gameplay, the leaderboard and the access to the pension materials performed well in testing and so no other adjustments were needed.

The outcome

The game well received by both the client and their employees. Banafsheh Ghafoori, pensions technical and communication manager at Kingfisher said "The game was educational whilst entertaining, and encouraged players to think about pensions in a different way - great for changing behaviour," 

Kingfisher's pensions team saw a notable increase in engagement with their materials. The group saw a 20% increase in the number of staff choosing to save into their pension at the maximum contribution level, while 78% said the game had encouraged them to think about saving for the future.

It was one part of a communications strategy which won many awards for innovation and education and received a great deal of positive press, including an article on the BBC news website.