TD Bank.

Creating personalized experiences for clients

Web Desktop • 0-1 Product • Summer 2021

MY ROLE

UX Design Lead & User Experience Designer & User Researcher

Jennifer T / Software Developer

TEAM

TIMELINE

July 2021 (1 week)

Introduction

TD Bank is a prominent Canadian multinational bank that serves over 27.5 million bankers. Our innovation lab of 12 work with TD Bank often for new ideas and business needs. At the time, our team was working on 4 projects.

The personal investing profile is a hackathon project created at TD Bank designed to improve the personalization for banking customers. The survey encourages customers to pursue their banking needs without fear or hesitation.

My role

As a user experience design intern at TD Bank, I led the design of the personalization investing profile. Over the course of 1 week, I collaborated with a software developer to research and create this first place winning project.

The key problem

Accessing financial services can be daunting and become a negative experience among people. There is a lack of personalization when accessing some TD services.

Our goal

Make the banking experience at TD Bank less daunting and personalized through the use of human emotions and psychology.

Our User

Before we started designing, we did a deep dive into existing users to understand them better. We defined a persona, and mapped them to their respective user journey.

  • 32 y/o Indigenous woman working as a healthcare practitioner.

  • Looking for new ways to save up money to buy a new home

  • Feels overwhelmed when interacting with a bank, fearful that she will get refused a service or charged a higher price due to her Indigenous status

Meet Joyce

Research

We dove deep into our research on negative experiences among various groups of people and other diverse communities, and here is what we discovered:

Prevalence of negative experiences among indigenous people when accessing financial services

Prevalence of Negative Experiences Among Diverse Communities

Financial stress affects everyone, but we all experience it differently. In order to make financial services less daunting, we need to investigate how to eliminate these negative experiences by looking at human emotions and psychology.

At TD Bank there are two levels of personalization. The first one at the very bottom is Bank transaction info which includes EasyWeb product and TD MySpend where they use you data to personalize the different features within the app.

The next level above that is personalization through observing actions and behaviours. However, we discovered that we can further personalize banking experience through human emotion and psychology.

Levels of personalization at TD Bank

During this step of our process, we looked at competitors that utilize human emotions and psychology in a form of questionnaires to understand their customers.

Competitive analysis

Our solution

A new assessment framework that can help TD to better understand customers needs, feelings, and experiences.

Early ideation

We started things off with a design sprint together with my hackathon teammate: Jennifer. Together we used Figma as a remote collaboration tool, we brainstormed components of the assessment form.

Based on our research we determined that these were the key demographic Information:

  1. Personality Traits: Big 5 Personality Test

  2. Biases / Heuristics

  3. Product-specific criteria

Components of the Assessment Framework

Then, we mapped out the architecture flow of the assessment to visualize the path.

Then, we compiled all our research into a chart to show the flow of what the assessment would do when a user begins the assessment. On the left we have the profile framework where the green indicates product specific information (eg. investing).

HOW IT WORKS

User data is collected through inquiry-based forms, while Quality Assessment informs profile creation, product-specific resources, and internal data accumulation. The harvested information empowers the generation of personalized app features, customer service enhancements, and the identification of future focal points.

Architecture Chart

We brainstormed various different question types based on unconscious biases and personality. The goal of this brainstorming was to come up with as many questions as possible that could be used.

User question pool

Unconscious Biases Question Pool
Personality Question Pool

Final designs

Playing with combinations of question forms

Users are presented with a diverse array of question formats, spanning multiple-choice, rating scales, and ranking systems to collect different sets of information.

Tailored profiles are generated for each user, crafted based on their responses within the questionnaire. These profiles offer insights into user traits and suggest suitable investment styles.

Personalized user traits

Comprehensive information

Following a comprehensive evaluation of the collected user information, it has been determined that users will receive recommendations encompassing risk assessment and portfolio advisory, investment choices, and personalized investment recommendations.

Key Takeaways

In this project, I've gained vital insights that have heightened my proficiency in user research and design. The project's captivating aspect lies in its strong emphasis on human psychology, encompassing habits, perceptions, and behaviors. The personalized profile quiz concept can seamlessly extend to various other banking products, such as savings accounts, bank services, credit cards, customer service, mortgages/loans, and insurance.

Reflecting on project outcomes

Challenges we ran into

﹖

Selecting which question form made sense for each selected unconscious Biases and personality question

Right question type.

﹖﹗

Deciding which information was relevant and important to include in the investment personality profile

Selecting relevant information.

How I grew as a designer

↪

Architecture flows play a key role.

Gained knowledge on the importance of creating architecture flows

✍︎

Learned how to apply psychology in designs, logic and application content

Applying psychology to design.