The Scotiabank Women Initiative Unifying a Vision

My Role

Lead Product Designer & Strategic Facilitator

I was tasked with a mission that was as much about diplomacy as it was about design: to unite a flagship $10B program fractured across organizational silos into a single, coherent digital experience that lived up to its promise of empowering women.

My primary tools weren't just Figma and analytics; they were synthesis, storytelling, and a relentless focus on the user need that unified us all.

The Core Conflict: A Fractured Promise

The old experience: siloed entry points and inconsistent design created a dead-end for users seeking the full scope of the SWI program.
My initial mapping revealed the core structural problem: the digital ecosystem was organized around internal business lines, not user goals.

The Scotiabank Women Initiative promised a unified front for women's economic empowerment. Its reality was a disjointed digital ecosystem.

A user in Commercial Banking found a dead end when seeking wealth advice.

Global Markets had no pathway to community events. The experience betrayed the program's core promise.

  • The data told a stark story: An 83% bounce rate wasn't just a metric; it represented over 1,600 people hitting a wall and giving up every month. This was the human cost of the structural problem.
  • The challenge was political: I needed to align disparate business lines Commercial Banking, Wealth Management, Global Markets each with competing priorities, onto a single, user-first platform.

My Process: Translation, Synthesis, and Alignment

I became a translator between business units and the users they aimed to serve.

Analytics revealed the user cost of the structural problem: an 83% bounce rate meant most visitors landed and left without engaging.
  • Diagnosing the Fracture:

    I mapped not just user flows, but organizational flows. I created a diagram visualizing each division's digital presence as an isolated kingdom. This visual was instrumental it transformed the problem from a subjective design opinion into an objective, shared business problem that everyone could see and agree on.
  • Architecting the Bridge:

    The solution wasn't a simple navigation bar; it was a new foundational information architecture that spoke the user's language, not internal jargon.

    1. I fought for categories like "Funding & Capital," "Education," and "Community" over opaque labels like "GBM Products."

    2. The debate for a global search bar was a strategic one. I used data on low redirection rates to argue that if we couldn't predict every user's path, we had to empower them to create their own. This was a critical win for user autonomy.

The Art of Stakeholder Alignment:

This was the heart of the project. Presenting IA options wasn't about getting a preference; it was about building shared ownership.

  • I ran workshops where I represented the user's voice, using data to show how a unified journey benefited each division by creating a more qualified, informed lead.
  • The pivotal moment came when a stakeholder said, "I see now. If a business owner gets a loan, she should naturally discover our investment services here." That was the moment the project shifted from a redesign to a transformation.
The new information architecture translated internal jargon into user-centric journeys, creating a single, logical pathway to all offerings.

The Solution: A Shipped Product, Not Just a Proposal

The shipped product: A centralized hub with clear pathways to all offerings, built on a unified design system for scalability and consistency.

The live site: www.scotiabank.com/women-initiative/ca/en.html is the validation of our strategic approach.

It is the tangible embodiment of the new, unified architecture.

  • A Centralized Hub: The site acts as a true command center, with clear pathways to dedicated sub-sites for Commercial Banking and Wealth Management, solving the critical fracture of the old experience.
  • Action-Oriented Language: The use of verbs like 'Get Funding,' 'Grow Your Business,' and 'Plan Your Future' demonstrates the user-centric labeling system we advocated for.
  • Unified Narrative: The platform seamlessly showcases the program's three pillars: Capital, Education, and Community proving we successfully unified the message across all business lines.

The design system we built ensured this consistency, cutting future development handoff time by 15% and providing a scalable framework for the entire initiative.

Impact & Results: Measurable Business Value

This project laid the essential groundwork for significant, measurable growth, proving the ROI of a design-led strategy.

  • Acquisition & Engagement: The redesigned, unified experience was a key contributor to boosting female client acquisition by 25% and increasing user engagement by 17% within three months of launch.
  • Operational Efficiency: The foundational design system accelerated all future development and ensured brand consistency across five product teams.
  • Data-Informed Validation: A/B testing on key flows, like application forms, achieved a 10% lift in completion rates, translating to an estimated 2,000 new accounts per month.
  • Enduring Strategic Foundation: The architecture and system launched in 2022 continue to serve as the scalable foundation for the initiative today. The live site demonstrates the successful adoption and maintenance of the framework, proving its long-term value and resilience.
The business impact of a unified experience: driving growth, efficiency, and user success.

My Learning: The Designer as a Unifier

This project redefined my role. A Senior Designer isn't the best pixel pusher, they are a strategic unifier and a facilitator of consensus.

Seeing the live site years later, serving as a central resource for women across Canada, is the ultimate validation. It underscores that our most critical task was not designing a single page, but building a resilient, scalable system that could endure and grow. This is the essence of strategic design.