Page 37 - A Guide To Financial Health v2
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Chapter 05: Secret to success
Demotivating → Personalized
Tools meant to help people improve their situation often have the opposite
effect due to their demotivating design. When a tool offers negative
feedback or unrealistic advice—like telling a user that they exceeded their
monthly budget by spending too much on medicine for their child—users
will abandon the tool and become far more likely to develop a psychological
condition called learned helplessness. A more successful approach will use
personalized, motivating design that uses positive reinforcement to help
people develop learned optimism, significantly improving the likelihood of
making sustained progress.
DEMOTIVATING EXAMPLES: traditional budgeting programs, consumer
finance apps
Scattered → Centralized
Peoples’ financial lives are complicated: Loans, multiple checking accounts,
pay cards, credit cards, and multiple sources of income. Methods of
interacting with personal finances—or even getting information about them
—are incredibly scattered. A solution that gives people a centralized place
to manage finances will increase the chances of making progress, simply
because it’s more convenient.
SCATTERED EXAMPLES: offering different tools for scheduling, budgeting,
saving, retirement planning, each from a different vendor and accessed in a
different place
