Financial Literacy through Gameful Design

Abstract

Canadians have been found to have little to no expendable income and find debt management difficult. Alongside the growing push towards digital service platforms replacing traditional brick and mortar solutions within the financial industry. Utilizing this motivation, and in partnership with Toronto Dominion (TD) Bank as a part of a MitacsAccelerate Internship, I propose a study to investigate methodologies within gamification and visual rhetorical accommodation to create potential digital solutions that alleviate these user experiences when dealing with financial situations. More specifically, how might we utilized personalization and visual rhetoric design within financial tools and services, in this case, credit cards, to assist the user’s knowledge translation of financial status, which I hypothesize will alleviate negative user debt and spending behaviours. In this work, I conducted an online study following a semi-structured interview with 60participants. Participants were recruited via an online user recruitment platform, UserInterviews. Participants were equally distributed across 4 conditions and a control group. The interview process began by probing participants about their current behaviours with their online banking and credit card platform. The interview then proceeded to present each participant with condition affected replica’s or TD’s online banking platform, Easy-Web. They were asked for initial impressions and presented a scenario in which participants cognitively walked through using the potential platform. First impressions and qualitative data about user experiences were then collected for analysis. Through the analysis, we discovered that users demonstrated positive effects in response to goal-setting oriented solutions and simulations of real-world consequences of their actions. In summary, our work opens up a venue for exploration as the field of gamification expands into financial settings, and provides experienced designers with a set of guidelines that could inform designs within financial settings.