Also in this report:

Flight patterns: Canadian Airlines’ mandate of quick and painless travel was central to the design of the company’s Web site: page 36

Toyota touch-screen: Toyota introduced an interactive kiosk to draw younger consumers to its display at consumer shows: page 38

Until recently, many people thought of banks as forbidding piles of Victorian rectitude or towers of glass and chrome soaring away from their customers at street level.

But competition from near-banks, some deregulation, and a more demanding, even fickle, public has meant a retail-oriented outlook and a user-friendly approach have become indispensible.

One such example is the Toronto-Dominion Bank’s participation in an interactive test project in the north Toronto suburb of Newmarket, Ont.

The project, Cablelink, is run by Rogers Cablesystems to test high speed cable and personal computer access in the 50 households selected to take part.

The project began in July and runs until November. Each home in the test has pc access to the Internet, America On-Line, Compuserve and TD Street.

Ronald Hodges, vice-president of personal access banking for td, admits TD Street is not something he would have looked at for the bank in the usual run of events.

However, now the experiment is off the ground, Hodges’ enthusiasm for it is palpable.

In an interview with Strategy, Hodges says td’s participation in Cablelink came about because of the Rogers connection.

Hodges says Rogers Communications is one of td’s biggest customers, and media mogul Ted Rogers sits on the bank’s board.

He says Cablelink wanted service content providers, and td took up the challenge.

Ellie Rubin, president of the Bulldog Group in Toronto, the ‘new media’ firm that designed the TD Street interface for the bank and for Cablelink, describes TD Street thus:

‘It’s a way to walk into a world of td so that they can show their products and services, navigate through [them,] and get a sense of the information that you need about them, and fill in a certain number of application forms or information forms to help you make a decision on your financial services vehicle,’ Rubin says.

Literature supplied by Bulldog says: ‘This digital bank interface plays on the use of a streetscape and the use of a personal banker (via voiceover) to guide customers through the process.’

Hodges says in considering the kind of environment td clients want, whether interactive or on the Internet, there has to be some reason for them to find the bank interesting enough to want to do business with it.

And he says in financial institution circles that means being informative.

This finding out more about td and getting personal advice from the bank, Hodges makes clear, is not a hard sell either.

Drew Eilern, a designer at Bulldog, says TD Street was created to resemble a small town street that could be considered Anywhere, Ont. or Anywhere, Canada.

‘We developed the opening screen as a street in a small town kind of community giving the user a more comfortable feel, not being intimidated by a big bank kind of thing,’ Eilern says.

‘That establishes TD Street, and, from there, you can move into a closer view of each building individually,’ he says.

‘Each building represents a different product or service that td offers. Once you activate that building, in particular, you move inside, and the interior [of the building] will be broken down into different interactive areas.’

To make this virtual street less cool to the touch, Eilner says a personal banker was added to the scene. There is an image of a banker users can click on to hear a voiceover explain this bank product or that service.

Some of the information users can find concerns pensions, rsps, mortgages, loans, and so on.

One big reason for the necessity for different buildings is, inevitably, government regulation.

Hodges says federal banking rules require banks to keep certain of their business interests separate.

TD Street, Rubin says, was not created to seem suburban or to take after Newmarket, and Tom Howlett, chief operating officer at Bulldog, says from a marketing and design point of view, TD Street had to be executed in such a way that it could play in every home in the country.

‘We weren’t targeting suburbia,’ says Rubin, noting td’s customers cross all regional, economic, cultural and linguistic boundaries.

As well as the novelty of TD Street, and the information it provides, it is also intuitively obvious the scene needs to provide a message from the bank.

Rubin says it is important that the interactive element of a marketing effort extend the product’s ongoing branding and image, as expressed in conventional media.

So, using this approach, she says, when customers are exposed to td’s digital side, they can concentrate on the bank as an institution offering a service, and consider the interactive communication an extension of the relationship between them, rather than worrying about high tech.

td gave Bulldog no specific instructions about how the company should proceed with the design of the interface; in fact, Howlett says, it was Bulldog that recommended the streetscape.

Eilner says the hardest thing about the execution of the creative for TD Street was finding a balance between a visually appealing interface and graphics and the actual function of TD Street.

Ultimately, though, he says, function has to win the day.

Unlike ‘old’ media, new interactive media allows a person to avoid advertising simply by not clicking on the icon behind which the commercial message lurks.

However, Rubin says that is not a problem with TD Street.

‘The objective of this is less of an advertising mode and much more of an [informational approach,]’ she says.

‘Give me information quickly, accurately, and as deep as I want to go.’

Peter Bochsler, a Bulldog designer, says his advice for anyone contemplating something similar to TD Street would be to approach its design as with any other project.

‘I think it’s important to design from a user’s perspective,’ Bochsler says.

‘You have to keep in mind that you are designing for people who are very computer-fluent, and people that are intimidated by computers as well,’ he says.

Howlett says the main idea is to design to the ‘lowest common denominator,’ although he cautions lowest common denominator does not necessarily mean creating the simplest design or allowing less interactive capability to be introduced.

Equally, he says, when designing interfaces such as TD Street, it should be remembered they must be kept visually interesting and their entertainment aspect should not be neglected.

So far, Hodges says, there is no evidence, either anecdotal or empirical, on Cablelink’s reception by the 50 households chosen by Rogers for the test.

However, he does say the use of TD Street ties in with the bank’s longer term strategy of creating a visual communications environment for its customers.