Before TD introduced generative AI pilots to its colleagues, a research team made up of anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists spent months examining the consumer perceptions and attitudes surrounding the technology.
TD research revealed how consumers were thinking about generative AI — everything from their excitement to their skepticism — and the struggles and successes they’ve had incorporating the technology into their everyday lives. Months later, the insights they gathered have been used to help shape the bank’s generative AI strategy and make the technology easier for its colleagues to integrate.
This research is just one element of the bank’s human-centered design approach that enables it to better understand the people it serves so that it can create more meaningful experiences for them.
“It’s the kind of design that doesn’t just create something that looks pretty,” said Christian Rohrer, Vice President, Human-Centered Design at TD. “Human-centered design allows us to be deliberate about innovating and we always start by first understanding the problem our customers are truly facing, not what we assume they are facing, before we dive into executing around a solution.”
What underpins human-centered design is the knowledge that everyone has unique wants, needs and abilities — whether it’s different motivations, a language barrier or an accessibility need. To build personalized and human experiences, TD takes an empathetic approach to innovation and explores what customers and colleagues are saying, what they’re doing and how they feel.
Human-centered design is carried out at TD by a team of colleagues with diverse backgrounds in a variety of sciences, user experience and user interface design, experience and content strategy and more. Together, they play a pivotal role in the bank’s innovation framework and help TD stay connected to the human side of innovation.
How TD Conducts Design Research
The unique design research methods TD employs as part of Human-Centered Design help create more effective solutions for its customers and colleagues, according to Imran Khan, Head of Enterprise Innovation and Design at TD.
“Our research lets us take a novel technology and ensure that we’re applying it in a way that keeps our colleagues and customers at the forefront,” said Khan. “It’s important that the solutions we develop are validated to address real needs.”
Before TD implements emerging technologies, its researchers typically study groups of users who were among the first to adopt the technology. Studying lead users helps the bank’s social scientists determine how a new technology impacted work environments and the people in them and learn from the successes and failures of these groups. TD takes its learnings from this research and applies them to its own implementation of these technologies.
This was the case when TD first introduced generative AI to its colleagues. Months before, researchers studied Kindergarten to Grade 12 teachers across Ontario. Classrooms were one of the first working environments disrupted by generative AI as many teachers adopted the technology to build tests and complete administrative tasks, while some students were caught using it to complete assignments.
Vanessa Seymour, the study’s lead researcher, conducted interviews with 12 teachers, a field study at an education conference with nearly 200 participants and a digital ethnography of popular Facebook and Reddit channels for teachers.
Seymour found there were barriers to the technology’s adoption. There is a learning curve with prompting chatbots to get the best output. Some teachers were also unaware of the technology’s limitations, thinking that it could be used to help them determine if their students were cheating. Student use of the technology for that very purpose, meanwhile, has led some teachers to believe that it shouldn’t be used in classrooms at all.
What TD took away from Seymour’s research was that it needed to be purposeful in how it introduced generative AI to its colleagues. The technology has a wide range of feelings and perspectives associated with it and those also needed to be considered before deployment to avoid deterring colleagues. And while generative AI can certainly improve efficiency, the colleagues who use it must be trained to realize its full potential.
It’s through research like this that the bank is able to make more informed decisions and take decisive action when innovating, helping their products and creations to have purpose and contribute to effecting positive change.
Driving Innovation with Empathy and Curiosity
At TD, meaningful innovation comes from beginning each project from a place of curiosity and empathy — taking an inquisitive and empathetic approach is essential to creating things that actually solve problems.
That ethos is at the core of the human-centered design process that TD employs, according to Rohrer.
“Innovation isn’t just about technology,” said Rohrer. “To create meaningful technology, you have to first understand who you’re creating it for and how they wish to use it.”
Human-centered design is about everyone being involved in innovation, not just one team or one group, said Rohrer. This mindset is a strategy of TD Invent, the bank’s enterprise approach to innovation that places a focus on empowering colleagues to bring their ideas to life and develop human-centered experiences. TD has worked to create an environment where all colleagues can participate in the innovation process, said Rohrer, and where the diversity in perspectives involved translates to the level of impact that innovation can have.
“Sometimes, in their excitement to ideate, it’s natural that innovators might forget to first pour time into the research and really go deep into understanding the human problem they’re trying to solve,” said Rohrer.
“What we always remind ourselves of at TD is that ideas mean nothing if they’re not focused on the customers, colleagues and communities that we innovate for.”
To learn more about TD Invent, visit tdinvent.td.com.
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