The Thrift Savings Plan's first Web site overhaul is coming in January to allow participants to more easily access their accounts, find important information and make investment decisions.

The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board said at its monthly meeting Monday in Washington that about 5,000 TSP participants will be randomly chosen to test the site in September. The board said it will use the feedback to finalize the Web site and iron out any bugs.

The TSP site has not had a major upgrade since its 1997 debut, and its design and functionality are outdated, said Penny Moran, director of the board's Office of Participant Services. She said the board will add interactivity, a modern layout and options to view information in different formats.

For example, a participant currently can review monthly returns for TSP's different funds only as a series of static tables and graphs. The new site will let the user click through a series of tabs to find facts about a fund, review its key features and performance history, and compare the performance of different funds.

The home page will be redesigned with a more modern, attractive look and better organized information, Moran said. It will prominently feature the login screen for participants to access their accounts and four main channels containing information on how to manage one's contributions, research different funds, plan for retirement, and determine how major life events such as marriage, divorce, retirement or military deployment will affect one's TSP account. The information on life events is currently scattered in different locations throughout the TSP Web site, Moran said, and participants have to search for that data.

"One of the things in designing this was to reduce the number of clicks that participants had to make to get to the information, and to recognize that participants get to that information in different ways," said Renee Wilder, director of the board's Office of Research and Strategic Planning. "Some might go through the [four channels in the] middle section, some may use the top bar for navigation, and others may use the quick links at the bottom of the page."

Moran said the Web site was designed so features could be easily added. For example, if Congress votes to create a Roth 401(k) option for the TSP, the board could easily design a Roth module for the site. Other potential features: additional interactive tables; podcasts from the board's executive director, Gregory Long; or video on how the TSP's lifecycle funds, the L Funds, work.

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