Internship • 5 min read

Weidmuller header
TD Bank
TD Site
Term
May 2024 - August 2024
Title
User Experience Design Intern
Responsibilities
  • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to develop UX strategies by conducting competitive analysis and user research, ensuring alignment with business goals and user needs.
OVERVIEW
This past summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work at TD Bank as a UX Design Intern on the Everyday Advice Journey (EAJ) Experience Strategy team. My role centered on improving the everyday banking experience for key customer segments, including students, youth, postgrads, and newcomers to Canada. I contributed by designing conceptual experiences that met both user needs and business goals, and my main responsibilities involved supporting research, UX design, and strategy. I collaborated closely with UX strategists, researchers, designers, product owners, and executives to ensure our work was cohesive and aligned with our collective goal of enhancing the customer’s banking experience and bringing value to it.

I had the opportunity to work on a variety of different projects including 3 major projects where I was able to leverage design thinking and the Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach from start to finish.
WHAT DID I WORK ON?

Purpose

Enhancing the everyday banking experience through cross-channel shopping.
The goal of the project was to differentiate TD from other banks by transforming customer perception from transactional to value-driven through personalized advice and tailored experiences. I contributed by creating design assumptions for the prototype, refining concept designs and making prototype adjustments, observing during usability testing, and assembling the presentation deck for our researchers to add their synthesized data. This helped shape a seamless, intuitive, and educational cross-channel everyday banking shopping experience for both new and existing customers.

Approach

Leveraging the HCD approach.
DEFINE
Design Assumptions
IDEATE
Concept Design
PROTOTYPE
Prototyping
TESTING
Observing Usability Testing
RESULTS
Key Takeaways & Presentation Deck
Although I joined the project midway, I learned how to adapt and apply the Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach to my contributions. Focusing on specific aspects like usability testing and user insights, I gained a deeper understanding of HCD principles, ensuring that the design decisions we made were grounded in user needs and behaviors. This experience allowed me to actively participate in refining the user experience and aligning it with both business goals and user expectations.

Process

Design Assumptions
One of my first responsibilities was to help define key design assumptions for the prototype, ensuring that the features and interactions aligned with both user needs and business goals. This step helped to set the foundation for the concept design.
Concept Design & Prototyping
Then, I contributed to the iterative process of refining the concept design and making adjustments to the prototype as we were going through with testing. This involved reviewing user feedback and ensuring the design was intuitive, seamless, and enhanced the overall user flow.
Observing Usability Testing
I also actively participated in observing concept testing sessions, gathering valuable insights into user behaviour and pain points. These observations directly influenced further prototype iterations and informed future design decisions.
Crafting the Presentation Deck
Once testing was finished, I supported in putting together a comprehensive presentation deck. This deck served as a tool for researchers, enabling them to add their synthesized data and share key insights and recommendations to stakeholders.

Learnings

  • How design and research complement each other: Design and research are deeply interconnected, not mutually exclusive roles. Research provides insights needed to inform design decisions so collaboration between these roles ensures that the final product is both user-centered and aligned with business goals.
  • Not all projects follow a linear process and remaining flexible: Remaining flexible and open to changes allowed me to effectively support the team and apply feedback, adjust to any changes, and help guide the project towards a successful outcome.

Purpose

To learn about people’s experiences with finances, their behaviours, relationships with banks and main pain points so that we can understand the user group and gather early feedback on concepts and strategies to consider in the future.

Approach

We conducted a monthly two-hour conversation with 10-12 participants, asking 4/5 targeted questions per session to gather valuable insights.

Process

Before our monthly sessions, I helped brainstorm relevant questions to guide our sessions, focusing on eliciting meaningful responses and really understanding our post grads' experiences. Then throughout the sessions, I took notes and documented discussions, ensuring that all critical points were recorded accurately. To further our understanding, I supported in transcribing the recordings to pull direct quotes and provide context. This was followed by a thorough synthesis and analysis of the collected data, which allowed our team to identify key themes and insights.

With the other UX Design intern on my team, we then created presentations to highlight the key takeaways from our research. We delivered 2 comprehensive 20+ slide presentations on our findings related to post grads, derived from our generative research. Finally, we presented and shared these key research findings with stakeholders, ensuring that our discoveries were communicated clearly and used to inform future decision-making and business goals.

Learnings

  • Prioritization and categorization: Prioritizing key findings to create meaningful connections in data
  • Effective storytelling and presentation: Being concise to summarize complex information and using visuals to overall enhance clarity
  • Stakeholder engagement: Understanding the impact of our evidence-based presentations on business outcomes and decisions.

Purpose

One of the final projects I had the opportunity to work on was the TD Innovation Challenge, where interns were divided into 15 teams and tasked to adopt an innovative mindset to develop solutions for the given opportunity statement. We were challenged to consider innovation, feasibility, user experience and user impact in our final solution. The top 5 teams would then present their solution to a panel of judges.

Opportunity Statement

As TD continues to enhance its digital capabilities for customers, what does the future brick and motor branch look like? What services and benefits could it offer to customers who will soon be able to do all banking from their phone?

Solution

Introducing the TD (Tea & Donuts) Tea House!
Our proposal cover
From the four key considerations, the idea for the TD (Tea & Donuts) Tea House was born—a concept that reimagines banking by combining smart technology with a cozy cafe atmosphere.

We wanted to transform the traditional branch into something more welcoming and engaging. With the TD app at its core, our solution integrated real-time data and authentication, making banking not only more secure but also more convenient for users. This ensured that customers can seamlessly manage their finances while enjoying the comfort of a cafe setting.

But user experience was more than just about convenience—it was about creating connections. We also thought to include Cafe Ambassadors to offer personalized support when needed, while community-focused events brought people together, helping to build relationships and trust in the TD brand. We wanted the Tea House to be a place where customers felt valued and alleviating any pressure to apply for banking products right from the get go. The Tea House is open to everyone, regardless if they are with TD or not.

In terms of user impact, we plan to partner with brands like Aeroplan to offer added value to TD cardholders, creating an inclusive space that goes beyond banking. And most importantly, we ensured our idea was feasible. By leveraging TD’s existing infrastructure and technology, we could bring the Tea House to life without overwhelming costs, ensuring a smooth rollout across branches.

I’m happy to say that our solution placed in the top 5 out of 15 teams and we presented our idea to the judges. I’m incredibly proud of what my team accomplished, not just for our placement, but also our idea's potential to redefine the customer banking experience!
During our presentation...
My team :)

Learnings

WHAT I LEARNED

Challenges

⚖️ Balancing projects and priorities

During my internship, I often had to manage multiple projects with different deadlines. Self-management and prioritizing tasks while ensuring quality work was a challenge. I learned how to effectively prioritize my tasks by breaking them down, allocating appropriate time, and adjusting based on evolving priorities.

💬 Navigating feedback

A key challenge was synthesizing feedback from the different members on my team, whether it was for prototype changes or how we approached generative research. Each team member brought unique perspectives so it was my role to integrate their input effectively. This taught me how to prioritize feedback that aligned with project goals and improve my collaborative skills.

Key Takeaways

🧠 Approaching problems with a design thinking and HCD approach

Throughout my projects, I learned how to leverage and apply design thinking principles to solve user problems. By keeping the HCD approach in mind, I ensured that all of my design decisions were rooted in user needs and business values, resulting in intuitive outcomes.

🤝 Importance of cross-collaboration

Collaborating was a huge part of my team and vital to the success of our projects. I worked closely with researchers, strategists, and other designers, learning how to effectively communicate, accept feedback, and align everyone towards our shared goals.

🤔 Remaining curious and active communication

Through this internship I learned that curiosity is key in UX design. By staying curious and actively asking questions, I was able to gain a better understanding of the process as well as user behaviours and pain points. Additionally, by actively communicating with others on my team, it helped us to stay aligned on project objectives.

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© 2024 Therina Castor