An immersive, experiential session that challenged a major bank's digital teams to think differently about who their customers are — and who they might become.
FutureFest was a bi-quarterly internal event at a major Canadian bank — a space for Digital Banking teams to celebrate and elevate thought leadership, and to learn from each other across disciplines. I was asked to collaborate with the Digital Product Equity team to co-create a session that bridged two distinct but deeply aligned practices: strategic foresight and inclusive design.
The result was Inclusive Design for Customers of the Future — an experiential, research-grounded, and interactive session that challenged digital product teams to look at their customers not as static segments, but as dynamic human beings moving through continuous change.
Strategic foresight designs conversations to foster resilience — building awareness, preparedness, and optionality. Inclusive design iterates for the human rather than the feature list, designing for the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of difference.
Together, they answer a question that neither discipline can fully address alone: how do we design for customers not just as they are today, but as they will be — through all the changes life brings?
One moment of change can alter a customer's entire life context — and therefore can alter the way we need to meet them.
Traditional customer segments and personas are powerful tools — they filter and group identity attributes to define markets and design relevant products and services. HENRYs, High Net Worth, New to Canada, people with disabilities: these categories serve a purpose.
But they have a structural limitation. Customers are multi-dimensional human beings living in a continuum of change. Understanding the multitude of individual data points that constitute a person's identity is both difficult and overwhelming — and as a result, segments tend to flatten, freeze, and under-represent the people they're meant to describe.
The session was designed not to lecture, but to transform — to build empathy through direct experience and challenge the mental models that shape how product and design teams make decisions every day.
Move beyond single-attribute thinking to understand how multiple dimensions of identity interact — and how a change in one can cascade through all the others. Customer identity is not a checklist; it's a living, interconnected whole.
Develop the habit of asking: what is happening in this person's life right now? Every participant in the room is an expert in their own human experience — and in moments where digital products have felt misaligned with their needs. This session invited them to tap into that expertise.
Serving the underserved isn't just an equity imperative — it's a competitive advantage. Understanding the diversity and dynamism of customers gives any financial institution an edge. Inclusive futures thinking reveals product and service opportunities that flat segmentation cannot.
The persona grid is a snapshot of a person's identity attributes mapped across two axes: the speed at which those attributes change, and how visible they are — to the public or to the institution. It gives teams an artifact for engaging with how a person's reality might shift when any one of those attributes changes.
At the heart of the session was a live change simulation. We introduced Lorraine — a current customer in the "older adult" segment, placed as a "presumptuous spender" by the UX research team. Then we did something traditional persona work rarely does: we put her in motion.
Using a change wheel and two rounds of simulation, we demonstrated how a single moment — personal or external — cascades through every dimension of her identity, her financial needs, and the products and services that need to show up for her.
Lorraine falls into a recognizable customer archetype — older adult, presumptuous spender. Her persona grid is filled out: foundational attributes relatively stable, situational ones anchored in a long career, contextual ones reflecting a settled domestic life. She is, by traditional measurement, well understood.
One personal change — a divorce — lands. What seems like a single event immediately begins cascading. Lorraine's relationship status changes. She relocates. Her mood shifts. She starts a small business with her new partner, changing her occupation. The persona that "knew" her no longer fits.
An external force hits — economic disruption, a shift in the broader environment Lorraine's new small business is operating in. She draws from accounts she tries not to touch. Her mood and occupation are impacted again. Lorraine 2.0 is now a substantially different customer than the one the segment described — with substantially different needs from her financial institution.
After two rounds of change, Lorraine's persona grid looks fundamentally different. The cascade effect of two moments of change — one personal, one external — has transformed her identity, her circumstances, and her needs. Products that served her before may no longer apply. New products she didn't need are now essential. The simulation closes with the key question: how do our financial services respond to and meet her evolved needs?
The simulation was designed to make visible what product and design teams rarely have the space to confront: the way human lives refuse to stay in the categories we put them in.
Traditional segments are often built to describe current states, not to anticipate transitions. The simulation invites teams to ask whether their products can bend with a customer's reality — or only serve one version of it.
Moments of change — divorce, relocation, career shift, economic disruption — are often moments of acute financial need. They're also moments where a customer's relationship with their institution can be made or broken. This is where trust is built.
By bringing plausible futures into our understanding of the customer, segments and personas become more robust, more nimble, and better representations of the full diversity of the customers we serve — and want to serve.
The session closed with four strategies for how digital product and design teams can carry the thinking forward — embedding it into the way they work, not just the way they present.
Use the persona grid to introduce dynamism into existing customer research. Map attributes across the speed-of-change and visibility axes. Ask: which of these attributes are most likely to shift in the next 1–3 years, and what would that mean for our product?
Every design decision is a prioritization. Inclusive futures thinking asks teams to expand their conception of the "edge case" — recognizing that today's outlier is tomorrow's mainstream, and that designing for the margins improves the centre.
Run your own change simulations. Bring customer personas into contact with plausible futures — personal moments (health events, relationship changes, career transitions) and external forces (economic shifts, regulatory change, technological disruption). See what breaks, and what opportunity opens.
Strategic futures are inclusive. The teams best equipped to navigate change are those that have already imagined the widest range of people they might be designing for. Inclusive design isn't a constraint on futures thinking — it's its foundation.
The primary deliverable from this work was the persona grid: a practical design artifact that teams can use to map customer identity across dimensions of change and visibility, run their own change simulations, and build more resilient, adaptive, and inclusive product thinking into their regular practice.
Beyond the tool, the session itself was designed to be transformative — to use the immersive format of FutureFest to land an insight that a slide deck alone could not: that our customers are always in motion, that moments of change are moments of opportunity, and that the most future-ready design practice is one that begins with the full range of human experience.