How Better Design Could Improve Retirement Planning

Retirement planning has become a digital experience. People increasingly encounter contribution calculators, savings projections, educational videos, automated portfolios, and personalized prompts through workplace platforms or mobile applications. Yet access to more tools has not necessarily made retirement decisions easier.

A 2026 randomized study comparing gamified education with financial infographics suggests that the problem is not simply a lack of information. It is also a question of how different types of information should be presented.¹

The researchers found that gamification and infographics produced different benefits. Interactive learning performed best when participants needed to reflect on their behaviour or reason through a decision. Infographics were considerably more effective when the subject involved complicated retirement rules, tax concepts, withdrawals, or fund structures.

The practical conclusion is more useful than declaring either format the winner. Retirement platforms may need two educational layers: visual explanations that reduce complexity and interactive experiences that encourage people to act.

Why Basic Financial Knowledge Is Not Enough

Someone can understand interest rates, inflation, and investment diversification while remaining confused about the rules governing an employer pension. General financial literacy and retirement literacy overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

Retirement decisions introduce unfamiliar terminology, tax consequences, contribution limits, withdrawal restrictions, and projections spanning several decades. Even a financially capable person can struggle to translate those concepts into a practical plan.

This distinction appeared clearly in the study. Participants entered the experiment with average basic financial literacy scores ranging from 71.7% to 76.5%. Their retirement literacy scores were lower, ranging from 59.3% to 68.1%.

That gap matters because retirement preparedness depends on more than identifying the correct answer in a financial quiz. A person must understand the rules, evaluate tradeoffs, and repeatedly make decisions whose benefits may not become visible for decades.

The challenge is especially relevant for younger adults. The OECD has warned that young people are using digital financial services extensively even though their financial literacy remains limited. Its discussion of financial literacy in the digital age argues that education should be paired with safe, age-appropriate financial experiences rather than treated as an abstract classroom subject.

What The Retirement Literacy Experiment Tested

The study involved millennial employees at a South African university. From an eligible population of 1,598 employees, 120 volunteers were randomly assigned to three groups. A total of 96 participants completed the full experiment: 29 in the gamification group, 33 in the infographic group, and 34 in the control group.

Everyone completed a pre-test and post-test covering basic financial literacy and retirement-specific knowledge. Both intervention groups received the same underlying educational content. One group viewed it through infographics, while the other also used a gamified retirement-planning application.

This design allowed the researchers to investigate whether presentation format changed learning outcomes without giving one group substantially more information than the other.

Both educational formats were associated with higher basic financial literacy scores. Gamification produced a 7.3 percentage-point improvement, while infographics produced a 6.4-point increase. The control group improved by 3.3 points.

However, the overall differences in basic financial literacy were not statistically significant. Participants already had relatively strong foundational knowledge, leaving less room for either intervention to generate a large improvement.

Infographics Won On Complex Retirement Rules

The more important result emerged in retirement-specific literacy. The infographic group improved by 12.9 percentage points, compared with 2.9 points for the gamification group and no improvement for the control group.

After accounting for participants’ pre-test scores, the overall difference between groups was statistically significant. The infographic group outperformed both the gamification and control groups.

The strongest gains involved complicated topics. Correct responses in the infographic group increased substantially for tax-free withdrawals, maximum withdrawals at retirement, withdrawal rights, and differences between retirement funds. These are precisely the subjects where dense wording and unfamiliar regulations can overwhelm a reader.

Infographics likely helped by reducing cognitive load. A structured visual can show relationships among contributions, taxation, fund rules, and withdrawals more efficiently than a paragraph of technical language. This does not make the underlying rules simpler, but it makes their structure easier to see.

For retirement providers, that points toward a practical design principle:

• Use visuals to explain rules, taxes, fees, and account structures.
• Use simulations to demonstrate the long-term consequences of decisions.
• Use prompts and progress feedback to encourage follow-through.

A single interface should not be expected to perform all three functions equally well.

Where Gamification Still Adds Value

Gamification was not ineffective. It performed better on certain decision-oriented questions and appeared more capable of promoting motivation, self-reflection, and behavioural awareness.

This distinction is essential. Infographics can help someone understand how a pension works, but comprehension alone does not guarantee that the person will raise a contribution rate, diversify investments, or begin saving earlier. Gamified simulations can make distant consequences more immediate by allowing users to test decisions and receive feedback.

A retirement application might, for example, let a user compare retiring at 60 versus 65, increase contributions by one percentage point, or experience a simulated market decline. Those exercises transform retirement from a distant abstraction into a series of visible choices.

This behavioural layer complements the broader movement toward digital financial guidance. Securities.io has examined how AI is expanding access to wealth management, particularly among people who have historically been underserved by conventional advisory models. Whether guidance comes from AI, calculators, or interactive simulations, its value will depend on whether users can understand and act on the output.

Educational design therefore becomes part of the product rather than an accessory added after the financial platform has been built.

The Better Model Is A Layered Retirement Interface

The study supports a broader product strategy: match the interface to the cognitive task.

A user learning about tax treatment needs clarity. A user deciding whether to increase a contribution needs motivation and context. A user selecting investments may require both. Combining every function into an elaborate game could obscure important details, while presenting the entire retirement system as static educational material could fail to inspire action.

A layered platform could begin with a concise visual explanation, move into an interactive scenario, and finish with a specific next step. It could also adjust the sequence according to the user’s knowledge. Someone who understands compound interest but struggles with pension withdrawal rules should not receive the same lesson as a first-time investor.

This is where personalization could make financial education more useful. The objective is not simply to generate more content. It is to identify the user’s knowledge gap, choose the appropriate format, and connect learning to an available action.

That approach also aligns with the value of starting early. Securities.io’s guide to investing in your 20s for long-term wealth emphasizes the importance of creating a personalized retirement plan and allowing compounding time to work. Better education cannot recover lost years, but it may help younger savers avoid losing them in the first place.

Principal Financial Group And Digital Retirement Education

For investors interested in the commercialization of these ideas, Principal Financial (PFG ) Group offers a relevant example. Retirement services are a central part of its business, and the company already provides participant education, digital planning tools, workshops, calculators, and a Retirement Wellness Score.

Principal has also argued that longer lifespans are increasing the importance of financial education and accessible planning tools. Its existing position in employer-sponsored retirement plans gives it a practical channel through which better visual explanations, interactive scenarios, and personalized interventions could be deployed.

The study does not evaluate Principal’s products, nor does it establish that a particular interface will increase revenue or assets under management. The investment relevance is strategic. Providers that help participants understand their plans and take constructive action may be better positioned to improve engagement, retention, and retirement outcomes.

The opportunity is not limited to making retirement platforms more entertaining. It is about making complicated financial systems easier to navigate without removing the behavioural support required to turn knowledge into action.

Why Retirement Technology Must Measure Real Behaviour

The experiment provides useful evidence, but its limitations are important. The final sample included only 96 people from one institution, 91% of participants held at least a bachelor’s degree, and 76% were women. Voluntary participation may also have attracted employees who were already more interested in financial topics.

Most importantly, the study measured short-term changes in knowledge. It did not determine whether participants later increased contributions, improved portfolio diversification, avoided premature withdrawals, or accumulated more retirement wealth.

Those behavioural outcomes should define the next stage of research. A platform can raise quiz scores without changing a person’s finances. Conversely, a well-designed intervention might produce only a modest knowledge gain while prompting a valuable action, such as enrolling in a plan or increasing automatic contributions.

Retirement technology should therefore be evaluated across a chain of outcomes: comprehension, engagement, action, persistence, and financial improvement. Measuring only the first step risks rewarding interfaces that teach effectively but fail to change behaviour.

Retirement Apps Need Clarity Before Entertainment

The study challenges the assumption that gamification is automatically the most effective way to modernize financial education. Interactive tools have a legitimate role, particularly when people need to explore consequences, confront behavioural biases, or build motivation. They are less reliable when the immediate problem is understanding technical rules.

Infographics succeeded because many retirement decisions first require clarity. Gamification added value where those decisions needed to become personally meaningful.

The strongest retirement platforms will not choose between the two. They will use visual communication to explain the system, interactive tools to reveal the consequences of different choices, and carefully timed prompts to help users take the next step. That combination offers a more credible path from knowing about retirement to actually preparing for it.

References:

¹ Grobbelaar, C., & Alsemgeest, L. (2026). Multidisciplinary pathways to retirement financial literacy: An experimental comparison of gamified and infographic interventions. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 14, 103556. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2026.103556