Christian Rohrer has an extensive background in driving user-centered design across leading global companies. After honing his skills at Yahoo!, eBay, McAfee, and Capital One, Christian now leads the Human Centered Design team at TD, where he oversees a team of over 300 professionals across North America. We recently sat down with Christian to explore his leadership journey and insights on design’s growing influence in business.

TD, a major player in the financial services industry, is where Christian’s team works at the intersection of business and technology, delivering design solutions that improve customer experiences and drive measurable outcomes. His team focuses on delivering innovative, user-centric design solutions that support TD’s diverse range of banking services.

Christian reflects on the evolution of design leadership, sharing his perspective on how strategic design can align with business goals, the importance of fostering a collaborative and empathetic team culture, and how design can drive real, measurable impact in an ever-changing business landscape.

1. History of Your Design Story:

What was your first design job and following career? What was your background leading into that role, and what was it like to be a designer at that time? Help us visualize the “younger you as a designer.” 

My first experience in Design was as a second-year PhD student at Stanford, when a new interdisciplinary graduate design course was sponsored by the Computer Science and Product Design departments. The instructors, Terry Winograd and David Kelley, aimed to teach design by forming teams composed of students from Business, Computer Science, Product Design, Psychology, and related disciplines, and having them work together, following a user-centered design process. The course’s format was co-designed by S. Joy Mountford, a member of the Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, and it was part of a multi-university program titled the Apple Design Competition.

I took this two-quarter course during its first offering in 1994, and then became its teaching assistant for Winograd and Kelly the following two years. My team specifically focused on the blending of real-world and online information, specifically designing a way of making it easier to access web resources encountered in one’s physical environment. 

Today, we address that need with QR codes and smart phone cameras and browsers, but in our design, we used a specialized device that was able to parse what was essentially a short URL, save it for later, and then pass it along to a desktop or laptop computer. Other teams in this course came up with designs that were well before their time, such as a GPS-aware device for entering virtual lines at Disneyland (similar to the Fast Pass and Lightening Lane) and an augmented reality sports-viewing experience. The success of this course helped inspire the d.School at Stanford, and its format is essentially similar to the core course of this well-known program today.

Members of my design team had good prototyping and design skills, but I was the only one with formal research training, so I spent more time conducting generative design research and formative usability studies to drive design iteration. This pattern continued throughout graduate school and ultimately led to my first job as a contract field researcher for a startup creating TV-based internet appliances (similar to WebTV). 

I landed my first full-time corporate job in 1999 at Yahoo! as a Usability Engineer and fourth hire in what would become the User Experience Design team. In this role, I was part of the design and research of the Yahoo! Home page, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Mail, all #1 properties on the web at the time. I led the ethnographic field studies that led to the design of Yahoo! Pick ‘em (fantasy sports), and pioneered the creation of Yahoo!’s usability labs and eye tracking research programs.

2. Design Leadership Journey: 

What is your current role and scope? How did your cumulative career experiences enable you to get to where you are today? Any key lessons? How did these experiences shape your worldview on design and business? 

I lead the Human Centered Design team at TD, including all design, research, content, and design operations personnel across Canada and the United States. We are a team of over 300 professionals and are deployed against up-front discovery teams, partnering with the business, and design delivery teams, partnering with technology. 

My career began focusing more on design research, and I eventually held research leadership positions at Yahoo! and eBay. After that, I made a conscious choice to lead Design teams, starting by heading up Design at REALTOR.com in 2008, and then becoming the Chief Design Officer at McAfee in 2011. Because of my background in research and the design of security, I then led Enterprise Design and Research as a Design VP at Capital One. At all of my positions, I have leaned heavily on Design Strategy based on Generative Research to understand the true nature of the problems worth solving. It’s no surprise that the design process I always advocate for includes iterative design and testing, first of concepts, and then detailed interactive designs.

But while the use of a solid design process is fairly common, I have spent much of my career as a design leader focusing on the culture we want to build. I often tell managers and leaders that “the so-called ‘soft skills’ of crucial conversations and ego free leadership are the hard skills of your role,” because these are truly what make the difference when you’re working with teams that interact with each other. I strive to lead with empathy for my team members and other functions, and spend as much time cultivating these soft skills on my direct team as I do anything else.

In terms of impacting the business, I have found there has to be a level of rigor around storytelling and reporting quantitative data. Executives are far less interested in learning about our design process or hearing a qualitative insight, but they are interested in the measurable impact of our work. I have worked to help define and measure what a good experience is and how it can be improved, with frameworks like the Simple Model of UX and the PURE Method, a method of measuring and diagnosing where the top ease-of-use issues are in a core product or service. 

What remains is to tie measures of experience against the business model in question, which is an exercise that varies, depending on the company and what it values. With Yahoo!, it was impressions and engagement. With eBay, it was transactions and success of key flows. With REALTOR, it was about the balance between buyer engagement and broker/agent revenue from promoted listings. With McAfee, it was about subscription conversion rates. At Capital One and TD (and banking in general), it can be all of these things, but at any given touchpoint, it varies.  

3. Leadership Philosophy:

What makes a strategic design executive? How do you think of and measure success as a design executive? How does that speak to what kind of role design executives need to play in the 21st century? 

Design can be strategic in many different ways, and the right strategic play depends on the characteristics of the business you’re in. I’ve found many approaches that work, and I’ll share a few here. But first, I’ll try to define what strategic design is – here’s a working definition:

“Strategic Design is the art and science of discovering, validating and building new ways of meeting user needs that creates and advantage or success over competitors.”

Note that I used both “art” and “science” in this definition, which is motivated by the fact that Strategic Design does not purely rely on the creative side, nor does it only include analysis of insights. Its power stems from using both of these modalities, often in an alternating way to understand, inspire, create, validate, iterate, and make solutions that truly work better for the target customer or user. We use our skills in creative thinking, visual expression and research to get where we’re going.

Now, some of our stakeholders will resonate with one or another of these modalities, which all depends on who they are. So, if we have people who “know it when they see it,” we might need to rely more on creating visual expressions of the possibilities to engage them. Or we may have hard-nosed, positivistic scientist-types, who only believe in quantitative data, and we will then have to bridge our qualitative insights into quantitative terms to get them to value what we do. But ultimately, the work is conducted by groups of interdisciplinary teams that may see the world differently from each other. What to do then?

Enter techniques for creating collaboration and alignment. In Strategic Design techniques, we often focus on the facilitation of perspectives and viewpoints about what we should do and why. Ideally, we base those in real-world observations and research, but even if we start with the perspectives of internal stakeholders, we can help the team to be more strategic, simply by getting them to talk and agree. We still use our visual skills to represent and iterate on what we’re talking about. And we still bring in research insights to inform decisions and debate. But in this type of Strategic Design, the facilitation of collective thought is the aim. Once achieved, the aligned team moves faster than any other kind of team, no matter how smart and talented individuals are. One analogy is a team of rowers, who may be talented individually, but succeed as a team, only when they are in sync. 

Measuring success as a design executive is difficult, because much of what we do is not easy to measure. Tactical design work can be more easily measured, like improving a design flow so it’s easier to complete. While this can be easily measured, this type of work typically does not count as strategic design, because it is simply the tactics of design. And traditional CX metrics like Satisfaction of NPS are too broad to be given Design the credit for (or pin the blame on them if such metrics decline). Instead, we often wind up having to create our own metrics of success. I would start with traditional business metrics your company cares about and tie the design work to those. 

Another approach is to try to create new metrics that can be collected and reported, which more closely resemble the impact of Strategic Design. I typically advocate for some kind of Usefulness or Effectiveness measure, which answers the question whether “a product or service does what I need it to do,” and then I also try to include a measure of Ease (for a consumer user) or Efficiency (if the user is an expert). Having a pair of measures for both Usefulness and Ease together is ideal as a set of success metrics, so if you can define and implement these, you’re ahead of the game.

4. Forward-looking changes in the industry:

What pivotal changes do we need to make as a profession? What is holding us back, and where do we need to make concerted changes? 

I think there will be several disruptions to how we work by the ever-more-powerful versions of AI that continue to launch and improve. I think Design needs to embrace how AI will change how we do what we do, whether that is the tactical creative work we do in design or the analysis we conduct in user research. It would be better to be driving the next generation of AI applications in the design field than to be waiting for it to ultimately disrupt how we work and what we do. It’s better to cannibalize ourselves than to have it done to us without having a say in how it is done.

5. Vision for DXC 

What is your vision for DXC? How do you see us making a positive impact on our members, design industry and broader business world?

I believe DXC can be a force for good by helping Design leaders share key ideas and perspectives that we know need to be more widely understood, either by other design leaders or those in partner professions, like Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, or Business. The more credible information we can provide that helps Design teams share best practices with their counterparts, the better.

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