Empowering members with PLAN with CPF
Designed an integrated goal-planning experience that combined fragmented tools into a single cohesive journey—improving clarity, increasing member engagement, and reducing the need for members to search across different screens to access the suite of planning tools.
Context
Note: The concepts and designs presented here reflect my thought process at the time of the project. They may have evolved since then due to team inputs, shifting priorities, or new insights.
CPF already provides a robust suite of tools—calculators, planners, dashboards, and guides. But these live across different pages, each with their own purpose, structure, and entry point.
Our broader vision:
Empower every Singaporean to take charge of their financial health through personalised and easily accessible guidance.
For everyday members, this isn’t empowering—it may be overwhelming. People aren’t looking for tools. They’re looking for answers. What if we planned around life, not systems?
Problem
The current planning experience is tool-led instead of life-guided:
Guidance tools are fragmented and assume high CPF literacy
There’s no shared entry point tied to relatable life journeys
Members don’t know where to begin or which tools are relevant
Planning feels complex, static, and overly reliant on standalone calculators and planners
Even those motivated to plan often give up—lost in a sea of jargon, scattered links, and transactional pages.
Goals
The Strategic Shift: Reframing CPF planning as a journey anchored in life events—not tool types. Make confident financial choices feel intuitive, supported, and personally relevant at every stage of life.
Phase 1: Awareness through a curated guidance hub for each pillar (e.g. retirement, housing), answering “Why should I plan for this?” and includes relatable motivators, essential tools, and actionable guides to drive self-discovery.
Phase 2: Empower members through a dashboard that reflects their current standing and surfaces relevant planners, forms, and guided actions to manage their life goals.
Phase 3: Deeper engagement through a deepened ecosystem featuring hyper-personalised nudges, life milestones with gamified badges and celebrations, auto-populated financial data, and expanded service journeys beyond CPF.
This phase transforms CPF from a service provider into a life planning partner—scaling from tools to total life guidance.
Members feel guided and supported, with clear next steps at every stage of their planning journey.
Tools and resources are surfaced contextually, aligned to members’ life goals.
Members can easily discover relevant services and confidently take informed actions.
Phase 1: Introducing a curated landing guidance hub
Potential discovery points
Key entry points identified included the homepage, mega menu, and Tools & Services page—channels we narrowed down as primary paths to a new unified landing hub. Other discovery channels identified were through search, forms, notifications, and social media campaigns.
Navigation bar - mega menu
Homepage
Tools and services page
Guidance hub layout
We explored the layout for the landing page, anchoring them around life-based journeys (e.g. Retirement, Housing, Healthcare).
These were designed to evolve in future phases alongside the dashboard.
Phase 2: From the guidance hub to PLAN Dashboard
Industry benchmarks
We benchmarked digital planning journeys across these platforms and looked for commonalities in user flow paths.
DBS NAV Planner: Strong use of motivational nudges, goal-tracking, and a progress loop
OCBC Savings and Life Goals: Life-stage framing, form-based inputs
MoneySense: Broad guidance on cashflow, wealth management, savings targets etc.
Before-during-after journey
We mapped the dashboard’s before-during-after journey across touchpoints like the homepage, year-in-review, campaigns, and roadshows—framing it as part of a broader ecosystem, not just a tool.
Potential discovery points
The "Golden Path"
The golden path is the ideal end-to-end journey where a member seamlessly discovers PLAN, understands their current standing, identifies gaps, and takes guided actions till one PLAN-ed life "well".
Life stage archetypes
MoneySense’s Basic Financial Planning Guide outlines six key life-stage archetypes that align with CPF journeys:
Young working adult (19–29 years)
Starting a family (25–34 years)
Supporting aged parents (35–59 years)
Have kids and supporting aged parents (35–59 years)
Pre‑retiree (55–64 years)
Retired (65+ years)
For each one, we looked at their intent coming in, what they’d expect to see on a dashboard, and reframed that into How Might We (HMW) questions. This gave us design angles to work from, shaped not just by demographics but by motivations and planning maturity.
For first-time users, their key need is to understand what CPF is and where to begin. While the guidance hub partially addresses this by offering step-by-step guidance, there's still room to improve how we onboard users and help them make sense of their CPF landscape in a more contextual and personalised way.
For returning users, the priority shifts to resuming planning, tracking progress, and exploring newly available tools or updates. This raises the question: How might we surface what’s new or highlight what has changed since their last visit to keep them engaged and informed?
Life goals
From there, we cross-mapped life goals (like retirement, housing, and healthcare) to the available CPF tools, identifying what an “ideal state” might look like. That exercise helped us visualise what kind of status indicators or nudges would be meaningful to users, especially those unsure of what to do next.
User story map
Determine current standing – e.g., input goals or see where you stand now
View steps to get to the goal – tools and actions tailored to your goal
Take action – embarking on their journey through utilising planning tools
Celebrate milestones – seeing progress or receiving confirmations
Most importantly, RECALIBRATE!
✨ Why Recalibrate? ✨
Of course, financial journeys aren’t always linear—and the journey doesn’t end after a milestone. Big life moments like getting married, having kids, or buying a home may shift priorities. Recalibrate creates a continuous loop in the experience.
Members are encouraged to revisit their plans, either by self-motivating or responding to timely nudges from PLAN with CPF. Whether adjusting for a new life goal or a change in circumstances, they can return to their planning flow and stay on track over time.
How might we shape the goal attribute cards?
We shaped the goal attribute cards to surface only the most relevant, timely information tailored to each member’s life stage—keeping it concise, motivating, and easy to act on.
Conceptual mockups
These were conceptual mockups to show the vision—motivational nudges, “where you left off” prompts, life goal progress trackers, and milestone rewards to introduce a light gamification touch. Each goal featured a guidance card tailored to relevant member attributes.
Minimum viable product for Phase 2
For Phase 2, the minimum viable product focused on only the core goal attributes—deprioritising milestone progress feature and simplifying data visualisation to reduce API calls. The intent was to strip things down to essential, bite-sized snippets of information—digestible, low effort, and useful.
This foundation sets the stage for a richer, more holistic dashboard in Phase 3—shaped further by members' feedback and real user needs.
My involvement in Phase 2: Dashboard ended at the conceptual prototype stage due to a shift in team priorities towards policy-driven product delivery. However, the planning model and framework that I developed were shared internally and laid the foundation for the continued development of PLAN.
Designing around life goals turned scattered tools into a more connected, purpose-driven journey.
Early concepts, even if rough, helped align teams and shape clearer product directions.
Even lo-fi prototypes can shift conversations. They were enough to spark the right conversations and push ideas forward.
Good planning doesn’t start with a tool — it starts with intent.