My role at TD is Senior UX Designer on the Wealth business unit - here I'm able to contribute to both the WebBroker Desktop App as well as the Easy Trade Mobile App direct investing platforms, included among the top online brokerages in Canada. During my time at TD the design practice has matured greatly, utilizing a strong multi-disciplinary team structure pairing UX with pure Visual Design, alongside Copy & Content and a design focused research team.
Positioned between the multiple direct investing platforms I am able to execute delivery work, where customer painpoints are identified, solutions are generated, refined and pushed to the live environment. As well as experience strategy work, where high-level design thinking and concepts are proposed and tested to gather inputs for future TD Wealth projects.
Process
For detailed design work TD's design team transitioned into a new agile framework (paired with developers) and as the design practice matures, myself and the design team are actively contributing towards the design system, in terms of platform audits and heuristics, leading to defining behaviours, best practices and usages across the platforms, as each component needs to be validated towards the changing system.
An example of a wealth design project that I worked on recently was the addition of market news and insights for new investors on the Easy Trade platform, where we could increase the financial literacy of users by allowing them to stay up-to-date on investing news and market changes directly in the trading app.
During projects like these, I would lead design activities like, completing current state heuristic analysis, engaging with the research team to stand up stakeholder workshops and drive business participation in the design process; then ideation, creating working prototypes in Figma, testing these prototypes with our users to gather insights, refining the design work, identifying any new components needed or look to the new design system for any improvements to older components needed.
As projects are spun up and then completed I'm able to move around to many types of design challenges, like adding new additional features, exploring new investing technologies, enhancing existing designs and current tasks, generating new north-star aspirational concepts and so on.
Closing thoughts
In this role I'm always learning new things about the financial/direct investing space and am able to grow my skills as a designer by applying experience strategy competencies that I had cultivated during my time in previous sectors like eComm, telecom, energy, etc,. to ease users into the world of investing and improve their trust and relationship with TD. Working within such a large organization like TD has allowed me to be more connected to the products and users, compared to my time at Publicis Sapient - and to be apart of the process that grows and improves the platforms over time.
With TD the challenge is always balancing business needs, with customer goals as well as delivering designs that stay competitive within the market. The financial/investing space in Canada is competitive and as new account types, investment strategies, regulation and pressure from external markets feeds into user needs, our job as designers is to stay on top of these emerging industry insights and adapt our products to the constantly changing landscape.
I love that I'm able to design for a local market, with direct impact and TD has such a varied selection of high-quality resources to help bring great products to it's users. TD also has an amazing patent inventor program and I was able to secure multiple filed patents in 2023 for design work.
