Launching Unity Mutual’s New Website: How Discovery, Design, and Deep Integration Delivered a Member-First Digital Experience

At Brace Digital, we love working on projects that have real purpose — and partnering with Unity Mutual to design, build, and launch their new website has been exactly that.

Unity Mutual is the financial-services brand of the Oddfellows, one of the UK’s oldest and largest friendly societies. As a mutual organisation, they don’t have external shareholders. Instead, profits are reinvested back into their members through fairer products, better returns, and added support. Their financial offerings — including ISAs, Junior ISAs, Savings Plans, and Investment products — are built around long-term stability and transparency.

Their mission is simple: help people build a secure financial future, supported by an organisation that puts them first.

The new website had to reflect those values — accessible, intuitive, secure, and designed around the real needs of their members. Here’s how we delivered it.

https://www.unitymutual.co.uk/

A Collaborative Start: Discovery & Requirements Gathering

Every great product starts with listening.

We kicked off the project with an extensive discovery phase, working closely with stakeholders from marketing, operations, customer service, and compliance. This helped us gain a deep understanding of:

• Their member demographics and digital needs

• Regulatory pressures and compliance considerations

• Operational workflows involving multiple back-office systems

• The limitations of their existing site and CMS

• The future roadmap for digital engagement

We paired this with user research and competitor analysis to shape a clear picture of what the new platform needed to achieve.

The outcome: a complete requirements set, covering content, user journeys, accessibility, and complex system integrations.

Turning Insight Into Detail: Specification Writing

With the discovery results in hand, we created a comprehensive technical and functional specification — the blueprint for the entire build.

It defined:

• The structure of every page and component

• Content governance workflows

• API requirements for the CRM, HMRC, and payment integrations

• Accessibility compliance and tooling

• Security and data-handling standards

• End-to-end user journeys for new and existing members

This document ensured that Unity Mutual, their internal teams, and ours were fully aligned before a single line of code was written.

Designing for Real Users: User Personas & Wireframing

We created a number of user personas with the Unity Mutual team based on their target audiences. During the discovery sessions we then worked through the following to bring the user journeys to life:

During these sessions we:

• Mapped out key journeys (e.g., researching a product, applying online, making a payment)

• Identified friction points from the previous site

• Created a new sitemap to include key content

• Prioritised accessibility — ensuring the site was fully usable for individuals with visual, cognitive, and motor needs

• Sketched and iterated wireframes collaboratively

These sessions helped shape a website that prioritises clarity, ease of use, and confidence — especially important in a sector where people need to feel secure about the decisions they’re making.

Visual Design: Clear, Accessible, Member-Focused

When it came to visual design, our goal was to create a digital experience that felt modern yet warm, trustworthy, and aligned with Unity Mutual’s brand values.

Key design outcomes included:

• Clean typography and layout for maximum readability

• Accessibility-first colour palettes and spacing

• A flexible component library for long-term content expansion

• A layout structure that guides users naturally toward the information or actions they need

• Integration of an accessibility toolbar allowing users to adjust text, spacing, masking and more

The final UI brings together trust, clarity, and usability — reflecting Unity Mutual’s commitment to serving members of all ages and abilities.

Building a Robust Platform: Development & Integrations

The build phase combined strong engineering foundations with complex integration work.

Two CRM Integrations

Unity Mutual uses multiple customer relationship systems, so we built secure and efficient API integrations to ensure:

• Lead and enquiry data flows correctly

• Policy information can be managed appropriately

• User details stay consistent across platforms

Payment Gateway Integration

To support top-ups, investments, and other financial transactions online, we integrated a secure payment gateway with:

• FCA-aligned security measures

• Encrypted data handling

• Seamless user experience from product page to confirmation

Engineering the Application Journey: Extending Umbraco Forms with Custom Fields & Advanced Workflows

One of the most technically involved aspects of the Unity Mutual project was building a seamless, secure, and regulation-ready online application process. For this, we used Umbraco Forms as the core foundation — but the out-of-the-box capabilities weren’t enough for the financial products Unity Mutual offers.

To meet the complexity of their business rules, CRM integrations, and regulatory requirements, we engineered a suite of custom fields, custom workflow steps, and API-driven validation layers.

Custom Umbraco Form Fields

Many of Unity Mutual’s application journeys require inputs that go beyond standard text boxes and dropdowns.

We built multiple custom field types within Umbraco Forms, including:

• Enhanced personal details fields with real-time validation

• Product-specific financial input fields, such as contribution amounts, annual limits, or minimum investment thresholds, postcode lookups

• Custom date logic to enforce eligibility rules (e.g., age checks, ISA year boundaries)

• Dynamic fields that change based on the applicant’s previous answers

Each custom field included server-side and client-side validation to ensure the data being submitted was accurate, secure, and compliant.

Testing, Testing… and More Testing

Given the nature of financial services, we carried out one of the most comprehensive testing phases we’ve run on a site launch.

This included:

• Functional testing of every journey and integration

• Accessibility testing, both automated and manual

• Cross-browser and cross-device testing

• Performance and load testing to ensure reliability during peak periods

• Security testing to protect member data

• User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with the Unity Mutual team

This rigorous process ensured that the platform was stable, compliant, and intuitive from day one.

Launching with Confidence

With design approved, integrations validated, and content finalised, we moved into a phased launch approach — ensuring continuity for members and minimal operational disruption.

Post-launch, we provided:

Full CMS training for internal teams

Technical documentation

Ongoing support and optimisation roadmap

Unity Mutual now has a platform that represents who they are today — and supports what they want to achieve tomorrow.

A Member-First Platform for a Member-First Organisation

We’re incredibly proud of the platform we delivered alongside Unity Mutual. It’s accessible, secure, easy to navigate, and built on technology that unifies their internal systems into a user-friendly digital presence.

This project is a great example of how a well-run discovery, thoughtful UX, and robust technical engineering can transform a website from a simple information hub into a powerful tool for member engagement.

Please contact [email protected] if you’d like help delivering a similarly complex or user-focused web project, we’d love to talk.