Case study • Vision & proof of concept
Private Wealth Advisor Portal
A 10-week Design Thinking proof of concept that re-envisioned the TD Wealth exploration journey and translated a 4-pillar advising strategy into a digital experience.
A 10-week Design Thinking proof of concept that re-envisioned the TD Wealth exploration journey and translated a 4-pillar advising strategy into a digital experience.
TD Wealth had research and a product vision journey behind them. They needed it validated, challenged from the outside, and re-envisioned end to end in 10 weeks, with a 4-pillar advising strategy made visible in the digital experience.
UX Lead. Synthesized existing and new research, ran collaborative workshops with advisors, and worked alongside one other designer to take it from discovery through prototype and testing.
Competitor research, two personas, three experience maps, the information architecture, and a 25-screen clickable prototype, tested in 35 sessions with 15 advisors and 20 clients.
For five years the TD Wealth team had invested in wealth-management customer research and built a product vision journey to elevate the advisor-client relationship: qualitative and quantitative research, concept exploration, personas, a vision roadmap, ideation, wireframing, user testing, and advisor feedback.
To validate what they had built, and to get fresh outside ideas, they engaged us for a 10-week rapid proof of concept for the mobile experience, using Enterprise Design Thinking. My role as UX Lead was to synthesize the existing and new research, and to help position TD as a market leader in Canadian wealth advisory.
Time-boxed, tight-team engagement plan was laid out.
1–3 weeks
4–8 weeks
6–10 weeks
Our discovery phase consisted of four types of desk research.
Synthesizing five years of the wealth team’s own research, concept work, personas, and advisor feedback, read for what it had settled and where it stopped.
Published industry reports on wealth management trends, to separate a durable shift from a pandemic reaction.
IBM’s existing benchmarking study of major Canadian financial institutions in wealth management, for an evidence-based read on TD’s digital position.
A competitor analysis of five products, looking at recent technical capabilities and the customer experiences built on top of them.
Only the last pass looked at products. The first three established what those products were being asked to answer, which is why the analysis produced a position rather than a feature list. Three things surfaced.
The market had moved to personalization, and it wasn’t a pandemic blip. Users now expect an experience tailored to their life stage, goals, and personal values. The differentiator for TD wasn’t features. It was the client-advisor relationship, supported by data and personalization rather than replaced by it.
Two user groups, not one. TD Wealth’s audience split into two major profiles: clients still accumulating and saving, and clients nearing retirement. We developed a persona for each, and the same screens had to serve both with a custom experience.
The pain was in the current process, not the interface. Empathy mapping and As-Is scenario work laid the existing journey out chronologically and surfaced where it broke down, which became the needs statements we prioritized against.
Research answered where the market was going and who we were designing for. It could not answer the other half of the brief, and this is where the engagement actually turned: the future-state experience was built with the advisors, out of how they really work, not drafted for them and reviewed afterward.
TD advisors assess and guide clients through a four-pillar strategy. It shaped every advisory conversation and was shared with clients.
The challenge was carrying it into the app as a far simpler expression of the same idea, and what to keep and how to show it were ideated and prioritized collaboratively in the workshops.
That is also the answer to the ten-week clock. Co-creating with the people who held the knowledge was faster than researching our way to it, and it is why the vision held up when it was tested.
It was the most closely co-created project I’ve worked on.
From the prioritized needs we sewed the ideas into a single key story. Our team wrote user scenarios from it, and from those we identified the key experiences and built the future experience vision.
By week 9 the team had a working click-through prototype of 25 screens covering goals, net worth, retirement planning, and the advisor-client relationship.
In week 9 an external research firm ran 35 user-testing sessions, 15 with advisors and 20 with clients, to validate the vision. I turned what came back into prioritized design recommendations and we iterated them into the final deliverables.
The vision did not stop at the engagement. It was carried forward into a phased delivery roadmap: define the north star, build a first release, then evolve the portal against the backlog we had documented.
Advisors and clients confirmed three things about the experience:
Bring advisor and client closer together, rather than automating the advisor out of the picture.
Give clients a clear view of their own wealth plan and where they stand in it.
Make it evident how an advisor helps a client manage their wealth.
Open to conversations about design leadership, product strategy, and human-centred design.
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