CONTEXT
For eight weeks, I worked with AGIRC-ARRCO, the French supplementary pension system, to explore how to help young people engage with their future retirement choices.
What began as an institutional question revealed a universal challenge : our relationship with invisible, delayed, and hard-to-anticipate decisions.
RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
To understand how young people approach future choices, we combined several methods to uncover real needs, motivations, and barriers:
Quantitative survey : reveal general trends and behaviors.
Targeted qualitative interviews : explore diverse profiles and attitudes toward the future.
Informal discussions : capture experiences and perceptions from people of all ages and backgrounds to enrich understanding of context and emotions around future decisions.
INSIGHT 1 :
How can we expect someone to play a game whose rules they don’t know?
Even when already participating in the system, young people don’t understand how their choices impact their future.
OPPORTUNITY :
Make the impact of each present action on the future tangible.
INSIGHT 2 :
How can you care about your retirement standard of living when you’re already struggling with today’s?
Immediate concerns take full attention, leaving little room for abstract or delayed decisions.
OPPORTUNITY :
Make future retirement choices relevant today by linking them to everyday decisions.
INSIGHT 3 :
Uncertainty about the future makes planning feel abstract and demotivating.
When the future, the world, and the pension system are unknown, imagining what lies ahead becomes nearly impossible.
OPPORTUNITY :
Enable users to explore all possible futures and their impact on retirement.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
“ How can we make the impact of today’s choices on an abstract future visible, so decisions can be made with full awareness ? ”
DESIGN
SOLUTION
SMOKING KILLS is a familiar warning : not to frighten or forbid, but to enable informed choices.
I applied the same principle to retirement with a timeline that lets users explore choices and scenarios, showing their impact without guiding or imposing decisions.
I then created a functional prototype using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to conduct initial user tests.
A series of user tests confirmed my assumptions: young people engage easily and show genuine curiosity.
"Oh ! I should declare my summer job after all."
During these tests, I also observed interactions to improve the timeline’s UX.
In December 2025, the supplementary pension fund relaunched its simulator to test the desirability of this projection.
Feedback will inform a large-scale rollout of my project.
This project shows that an uncertain future can become a space for exploration: with the right tools, people can experiment, understand, and take ownership of their choices instead of being passive.
