Future Ready: Emma’s TD Experience
As a global banking leader, TD plays a crucial role in supporting users worldwide. As part of the UX Enterprise Experience Team, we set out to reimagine and elevate the future TD customer experience, exploring innovative ways to make banking seamless, intuitive, and empowering.
team
1 Product Designer (me)
1 Design Strategist
1 Design Researcher
my role
Facilitated 16 workshops with TD’s domain leaders, aligning UX strategies into a unified enterprise vision. Defined 17 concept features, designing wireframes and prototypes. Co-created a 36-page Enterprise storyboard, transforming stakeholder insights into a user-centered roadmap.
nda project
Due to confidentiality, certain visuals and proprietary design assets have been excluded from this case study.
Design Challenge
"What should the TD user experience look like in the next five years?"
what's the problem
Banks are often perceived as impersonal, associated with negative experiences like mounting bills or complex processes. This project aimed to shift that narrative by showing how TD could become a trusted, supportive part of our customers' lives. The challenge was to define what TD’s future user experience should look like as a bank and a brand.
solution
To address this, we developed a storyboard centered around "Emma," a young adult navigating a significant life transition. The journey illustrated how TD could provide personalized tools and guidance—from budgeting and goal-setting to planning a remote work lifestyle—helping users confidently manage their financial future.
outcome
16 stakeholder review workshops garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback, affirming Emma’s story as a compelling representation of TD’s unified future vision. Inspired by its success, senior leadership approved the project’s expansion, tasking our team with creating two additional storyboards for small business owners and first-time homebuyers.
Setting the Stage: Reimagining TD’s Future User Experience
Our team set out to answer a compelling question: What should TD’s user experience feel like by 2028? The goal was to craft a cohesive narrative showing how customers interact with TD as a bank and brand. Beyond improving individual touchpoints, we wanted to envisioned an enterprise-wide experience guiding users through major life transitions with confidence.
Given the broad scope, we focused on a single user persona to make the vision more focused and impactful. The objective was to show how TD could seamlessly integrate into a user’s life, offering support for tasks like budgeting, financial planning, and managing life’s transitions. The challenge was clear: design a future experience that felt personal, supportive, and human.
My Role: Bridging Insights and Design
As the Product Design Intern, I took on key responsibilities to bring this vision to life:
Facilitating 16 Stakeholder Workshops to Align Insights and Future Vision: TD’s product department is organized into specialized areas, each focusing on different aspects of the user experience. I worked closely with leaders in these areas to gather insights on their users' needs and ensure our narrative reflected these priorities. This involved synthesizing feedback and aligning goals to inform the broader future vision.
Conceptualizing and Creating 17 Future Design Concepts: I researched existing concepts developed by different domain teams and integrated them into our vision. For gaps where no solutions existed, I proposed new ones. Using Figma, I created low-fidelity wireframes to illustrate how TD could empower users during pivotal life moments, like buying a home or planning for retirement.
Deciding on a Story Persona
We knew that for the story to resonate, we needed to center it around a single representative persona—a protagonist who could showcase the diverse yet unified experiences TD offers. Incorporating various user groups would dilute the story's impact. We chose to focus on a single key user group to create a more meaningful and cohesive narrative. After analyzing research within TD and evaluating several potential personas, the post-grad emerged as the best fit. This persona represented a significant segment of TD’s user base and was tech-savvy, financially engaged, and eager to improve their financial literacy.
Facilitating Stakeholder Workshops: Aligning a Future TD Vision
TD’s product department is divided into domains, each focused on distinct aspects of the user experience. The Domain Leaders were pivotal stakeholders, as their insights shaped the foundation of our enterprise-wide vision. My role was to ensure their voices were heard, aligning the unique goals and user experiences from each domain into a cohesive, unified narrative.
I facilitated 16 one-on-one workshops with these Domain Leaders to gather insights. Working closely with my team, I developed a structured workshop format to ensure productive, focused sessions. Each workshop was divided into 4 parts:
01. Understanding user needs and behaviors in each domain
02. Reviewing domain-specific data, feature concepts, and existing solutions
03. Exploring emerging trends shaping the strategies within each domain
04. Defining the future vision for each domain's user experience
These workshops provided valuable insights into each domain across TD, helping us integrate these varied experiences into a unified vision for the future of the customer journey.
Meet Emma! The 22-Year-Old Post-Grad Moving to the Big City
To create a realistic post-grad persona, our team began by reviewing past research. Insights from TD user interviews and studies, gathered by our design researcher, provided a strong foundation for understanding the post-grad experience. My role was to synthesize this raw data into a more digestible format, allowing the team to analyze and apply it effectively.
After organizing the research, we identified key insights. For example, a quote like ‘Meet me where I am’ highlighted the need for TD to integrate seamlessly into users' daily lives. This emphasized focusing on digital communication and strengthening TD’s social presence. We also recognized the importance of reinforcing TD’s commitment to social and environmental responsibility—issues that are increasingly significant in today’s world and play a vital role in building brand loyalty and trust.
Using these insights, I helped shape Emma’s persona by outlining her needs, behaviors, and motivations. This detailed profile not only deepened our understanding of her as a complex individual but also laid the foundation for future design concepts tailored to her needs.
With Emma’s persona established, we drafted her story, highlighting challenges like finding rental housing without a credit history, dealing with a car accident, and managing a tight budget. To ensure accuracy, I conducted user testing by reviewing the draft with post-grad and intern co-workers. Their feedback helped refine the narrative, ensuring it closely aligned with real-world experiences.
Creating Future Design Concepts
With Emma’s story established, I led the design of the TD concept features within her narrative. Drawing from insights gained during workshops with Domain Leaders, I refined existing features and ideated 17 new solutions to address gaps, ensuring they aligned with Emma’s goals.
A key example was Emma’s TD mobile app, which categorized her past spending and projected future expenses with personalized insights. For instance, the app highlighted purchases from local businesses, reflecting Emma’s values. It also provided actionable tips, such as how saving $15 a month on coffee could help her reach bigger goals, like buying a new car. These features not only supported Emma’s financial journey but also motivated her by breaking down larger goals into attainable steps rooted in her daily spending habits.
The focus wasn’t on creating a final product, but on conveying how users would feel while using these features. The concepts illustrated a future TD experience that was personalized, secure, and user-centric, with an emphasis on supporting financial and physical well-being, rather than simply selling products. The key question was: How could TD support Emma, and how would it make her feel?
Redefining the TD Experience: Emma's Journey
While my team lead finalized Emma’s story and accompanying sketches, I concentrated on designing the future TD concept features integrated into her journey. The final deliverable was a PowerPoint presentation, featuring Emma’s 36-page storyboard with voiceover narration. Due to NDA restrictions, I am unable to share the completed storyboard.
Validating the Vision: Stakeholder Feedback and Next Steps
After completing Emma’s future TD Enterprise Experience Storyboard, we refined it based on feedback from key stakeholders. To ensure alignment with TD’s vision, we held feedback workshops with the 16 Domain Leaders before sharing it with the entire product organization—a major milestone for the project.
Before my internship concluded in September, I helped facilitate three initial sessions. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Domain Leaders praised how Emma’s story reflected their aspirations and captured TD’s future goals. The post-grad perspective also resonated strongly, aligning with themes from their own research. Based on this feedback, we made minor adjustments to the illustrations and fine-tuned Emma’s onboarding process for clarity.
The positive response led to a pivotal decision from TD’s senior product leadership: they approved the expansion of the project. Building on the success of Emma's story, leadership entrusted us with developing two new storyboards focused on small business owners and first-time homebuyers—key customer segments that would drive a unified and forward-thinking vision for TD’s future.
