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Small Website Enhancements Help Improve Retirement Outcomes

Making simple design enhancements to a retirement enrollment website can produce results that are similar to an employer increasing its match limit, according to a new study.

Conducted in association with Voya Behavioral Finance Institute for Innovation, Saurabh Bhargava and Lynn Conell-Price of Carnegie Mellon University, Richard Mason of City, University of London, and Shlomo Benartzi of UCLA set out to determine whether non-economic features help influence 401(k) plan enrollment decisions.

The resulting findings in “Save(d) by Design” show that small digital changes can lead to improved results in terms of greater personalized enrollment, more employees taking advantage of the full company match, increased savings and long-term financial security.

The authors contend that while automatic enrollment has been successful in raising 401(k) plan participation, a significant share of enrollees remain at-risk for retirement insecurity, which could be due in part to an employee’s initial decision to enroll at the default rate.

To learn more about the behavioral aspects of this decision-making, the authors examined what would happen when three types of design enhancements were made to retirement enrollment websites:


  • moving important plan information (i.e., the default savings rate) closer to where the individual was prompted to act;

  • simplifying and standardizing the language associated with the enrollment options; and

  • changing from a single color design on the election buttons to three “traffic light” colors.


The study involved more than 8,500 employees across 500 workplace retirement plans. The workers, who were auto-enrolling into their employer-sponsored 401(k) plans, visited their respective enrollment websites to either confirm, decline or make personal adjustments to their savings selection.

“While we should continue to apply these important strategies [such as automatic enrollment and providing a generous match], this latest research suggests that making simple adjustments to website architecture presents another promising way to improve the choices of auto-enrolled workers — something that can be attractive to an employer that is not in a position to change its match level or plan design,” notes Charlie Nelson, CEO of Retirement and Employee Benefits for Voya Financial.

In fact, the study shows that the tested enhanced design led to:


  • Greater enrollment personalization:The number of employees who personalized their enrollment increased by 15%. Among those who personalized, the average contribution rate was 7.8%, compared to 3.4% for those who accepted auto-enrollment.

  • Increased take-up of full company match:The enhancements resulted in a 19% increase in the share of employees who took advantage of the company’s full match benefit. This demonstrated how optimized enrollment design could actually increase the effectiveness of existing matching incentives, amplifying employee sensitivity to the generosity of the plan match, the authors note.

  • Improved plan savings and retirement security:The design changes also led to an increase in savings levels, raising the average contribution rate by 62 basis points or nearly 10% across all digital enrollees. That lift was equivalent to what one would expect from increasing the typical employer match by 62%, according to the study.


“Because employees don’t often adjust their initial contribution rates after enrollment, these initial increases due to digital design can lead to meaningful improvements in long-run retirement security,” explains Benartzi, a UCLA Anderson School of Management professor and a senior academic advisor to the Voya Behavioral Finance Institute for Innovation.

“The most compelling result was the shift toward personalization,” Benartzi adds. “When people personalize their plan choices, it suggests that they are being reflective and thinking about the best possible solutions for themselves.”

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