Modernizing the Social Security Retirement application

Helping people navigate consequential retirement decisions through clear content, evidence-based design, and a reusable application framework.

Overview

Applying for Social Security retirement benefits involves decisions that can affect when people receive benefits and how much they receive. Applicants may need to understand how continued employment, lifetime earnings, and personal circumstances affect their eligibility and payments.

Our challenge was to make those decisions understandable in a self-service application without requiring applicants to interpret complicated policy language.

Working with a multidisciplinary team, I helped redesign SSA's Retirement application, building on the design patterns established through the Lump Sum Death Payment and Medicare projects.

My contributions included designing section introductions, developing an approach to reviewing lifetime earnings, and writing explanatory content that helped applicants understand why certain questions mattered among other contributions.

The project demonstrated how research could reveal consequential misunderstandings that might otherwise go unnoticed and how relatively straightforward design decisions could help prevent them.

The challenge: Making consequential decisions understandable

SSA was modernizing its benefit applications, replacing aging technology while improving the experience for people applying for benefits.

The Retirement application presented a different set of challenges from Medicare.

Applicants needed to provide information about their employment, earnings, and personal circumstances. Some of that information could affect the benefits available to them or the timing and amount of their payments.

For example, people applying before reaching full retirement age may be subject to an earnings limit. Depending on how much they earn while receiving benefits, some payments may be withheld.

These rules can be difficult to understand, particularly for applicants who intend to continue working before full retirement age.

The application needed to collect accurate information while helping people recognize the implications of their answers.

Our central design challenge was to make a complicated financial decision-making process understandable without overwhelming applicants with policy details.

My role

I worked collaboratively with two other UX designers across discovery, application flows, Figma designs, research planning, usability testing, synthesis, and iteration.

My individual contributions included:

• Designing section-start pages that oriented applicants before beginning a group of questions.
• Developing a lifetime earnings review experience that performed better than competing approaches in usability testing.
• Creating explanatory content for questions whose relevance might not be immediately apparent to applicants.

I also contributed to broader team decisions about the application experience, working with policy experts, claims specialists, and developers to balance user needs, policy requirements, and technical constraints.

The work was highly collaborative, but these three areas provide concrete examples of design decisions I helped shape and evaluate.

Understanding the application and its constraints

We built on the foundation established during the Medicare redesign, reusing patterns and approaches where they made sense.

However, Retirement introduced different questions and decision points.

Applicants might need to report employment and earnings information, review their lifetime earnings record, or answer questions about circumstances that could affect their benefits.

Some questions were straightforward on their own but potentially confusing without context. For example, applicants might not understand why SSA needed information about a former spouse or employment in the railroad industry.

We needed to make the purpose of these questions understandable without turning the application into an explanation of every underlying policy.

Our work involved mapping application flows, designing interactions in Figma, and using high-fidelity prototypes to evaluate how applicants understood and navigated the experience.

A key design decision: Helping applicants review lifetime earnings

One of my most significant contributions was designing the experience for reviewing an applicant's lifetime earnings record.

This information was important because in the past applicants would state they did not agree with the earnings record and this would lead to higher administrative costs because the applicant would be recontacted by a claims specialist.

The design challenge was how to present a potentially long list of information without overwhelming the page.

We explored different approaches.

One alternative placed the earnings list inside an accordion, allowing applicants to expand it when they wanted to review the information.

My approach presented the earnings directly on the page in a scrollable experience, making the information visible without requiring any additional interaction.

What usability testing revealed

The difference between these approaches became apparent during usability testing.

When the earnings were hidden inside an accordion, participants frequently didn't expand it.

Some subsequently indicated that they disagreed with the earnings information, despite never having reviewed the actual list.

The interaction had created a problem: information that was technically available wasn't necessarily being seen.

My approach, which displayed the earnings directly, performed better in testing.

For information as consequential as lifetime earnings, reducing visual complexity wasn't necessarily the most important objective. Ensuring applicants encountered and understood the information mattered more.

The research gave us evidence to favor a design that made the earnings record visible rather than relying on applicants to discover it.

A key design decision: Creating meaningful section introductions

Another area I worked on was the design of section-start pages.

A benefits application can feel like an uninterrupted series of questions, particularly when applicants don't know what information will be requested next.

I designed introductory pages that helped applicants understand what a section would cover before they began answering questions.

These pages communicated the purpose of the section, identified information applicants might want to have available, and provided an estimate of the time required.

The intent was to help people prepare rather than discover requirements midway through a section.

What we learned

During usability testing, participants expressed appreciation for these introductions.

They provided context and helped establish expectations before applicants began a new part of the process.

The pages also created a clearer structure for the application, breaking a long experience into more understandable parts.

This was a relatively small design intervention, but it reflected a broader principle: people benefit from understanding where they are in a process and what will be expected of them.

A key design decision: Explaining why questions mattered

I also contributed to the content strategy for questions that might otherwise seem irrelevant or intrusive.

Some questions in a retirement application concern circumstances applicants may not immediately associate with their own benefits.

For example, information about a previous marriage or railroad employment may be relevant to benefit eligibility or processing.

Without an explanation, applicants could reasonably wonder why SSA was asking.

We used concise introductory text and progressive disclosure to provide context when it was needed.

The goal was to communicate enough information to help applicants answer confidently without overwhelming them with policy details.

This required considering both the language of individual questions and the surrounding experience.

Rather than expecting applicants to understand SSA's internal reasoning, we worked to make the relevance of the questions apparent.

These content approaches also contributed to patterns used in subsequent benefit application modernization efforts.

Prototyping and evaluating the experience

As with Medicare, our team worked closely with front-end developers to build high-fidelity, interactive prototypes.

The prototypes allowed us to evaluate realistic application flows rather than relying exclusively on static screens.

They also supported a workflow in which tested interactions could be carried forward into production development through service integration.

I contributed to research planning, facilitator guides, usability sessions, observation, synthesis, and design iteration.

We conducted seven rounds of usability testing with approximately five participants per round. Tests were both on mobile devices and desktops.

The research helped us answer specific research questions, understand how applicants interpreted questions, navigated the experience, and interacted with different design approaches.

It also allowed us to compare alternatives directly.

The lifetime earnings review was a particularly valuable example: the research exposed a problem that might not have been obvious from a design review alone.

An accordion appeared to offer a cleaner presentation, but observing actual participants revealed that it could obscure information they needed to evaluate.

This reinforced the value of evaluating whether an interaction supports the applicant's task rather than judging it primarily by its visual simplicity.

Designing for reuse and faster delivery

The Retirement application extended the modernization foundation developed through Lump Sum Death Payment and Medicare.

We continued using Figma, reusable page components, and a close design-development workflow.

Rather than beginning with an entirely new set of patterns, we could build on approaches already explored and tested in previous applications.

The high-fidelity Angular prototypes also supported continuity between research and implementation.

This approach helped reduce duplicated work and supported a more efficient path from design decisions to a functioning application.

Retirement also contributed additional patterns, particularly around explanatory content and progressive disclosure, that informed work on Disability and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

The result was an increasingly reusable approach to designing benefit applications, even as each program introduced its own requirements and complexities.

Outcomes and impact

A modernized Retirement application

The redesigned Retirement application launched in summer 2026.

The work contributed to modernizing a major public service used by a large population of applicants.

While I don't have verified completion-rate or satisfaction metrics from production, the launch represented the delivery of a redesigned self-service experience for an important federal benefits program.

Evidence-based improvements to consequential interactions

Usability testing helped us identify design approaches that better supported applicants' understanding of important information.

The lifetime earnings review was a concrete example.

Testing revealed that hiding earnings inside an accordion could lead applicants to overlook information they needed to review.

The visible earnings design performed better, giving the team evidence to support an interaction that prioritized comprehension and review over a more compact presentation.

Clearer orientation and explanations

Section-start pages helped applicants prepare for upcoming questions, and participants responded positively to the additional context.

Explanatory content also helped make the relevance of certain questions clearer, particularly when the connection to retirement benefits wasn't immediately apparent.

Together, these decisions supported an experience intended to feel more understandable and less bureaucratic.

Reusable design patterns

The project extended the design and technical foundation established during Medicare.

Patterns for explanatory content and progressive disclosure informed subsequent work on Disability and SSI.

This helped the team continue modernizing benefit applications without repeatedly solving the same interaction and content problems.

What I learned

One of the most important lessons from Retirement was that the simplest-looking interface isn't always the clearest experience.

The lifetime earnings review demonstrated this particularly well.

An accordion reduced the amount of information visible on the page, but it also made consequential information easier to miss.

Usability testing showed why it was important to evaluate designs against applicants' actual understanding and behavior rather than relying on assumptions about what would make a page feel less overwhelming.

I also learned how much value can come from relatively modest content and structural decisions.

A section introduction or a short explanation of why a question matters may not appear to be a major feature, but these details can influence how prepared and confident applicants feel as they navigate a complex process.

What I would do differently

One challenge was that technical constraints sometimes emerged relatively late in the design process.

These discoveries affected design decisions and required adjustments after work had already progressed.

Looking back, I would advocate for earlier and more continuous validation of technical feasibility, particularly when extending patterns from one benefit application into another.

I would also push for human-centered design activities to continue beyond the initial launch.

Although we conducted extensive usability testing with prototypes, I believe evaluating the live application would have provided additional opportunities to understand how the experience performed in real-world conditions.

That feedback could have informed further improvements and helped close the gap between a successfully tested design and an effective production experience.

Reflection

The Retirement redesign reinforced that designing public services isn't simply about making complicated processes shorter.

It's about helping people understand information, recognize the implications of their decisions, and navigate the process with confidence.

My work on the lifetime earnings review, section introductions, and explanatory content reflected that responsibility.

The project also demonstrated how a reusable design and development foundation could support modernization across multiple benefit programs.

For me, its most important lesson was that effective design requires more than making information available. It requires understanding whether people actually encounter, interpret, and use that information when making consequential decisions.