Block Planet - Increasing user engagement in personal finances, using gamification in a mobile banking application

Nørgaard, Anders ; Svendsen, Mathias Utne Kærholm ; Sloth, Ulrik Kroge

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2017

2017-05-21

63 pages

The cashless society have become more of a reality over the last years. Even though this improves convenience for the users, studies suggest that it does have negative side effects as well, such as people having a harder time keeping an overview of their financials. Many business applications have been developed to solve this problem, where some uses gamification. These applications solve some of the issues, by helping the user to get an overview of the financials. However, even though the applications provide the tools to get a better overview of their financials, they do little in terms of motivating users to log in frequently and use these tools. The aim for this study is to investigate whether an application with a large focus on the gamification aspect, will help motivate the users to log in frequently, and thereby increase their financial overview. As legal issues makes it difficult to access the users banking information for a test, we decided to use the Spar Nord Banks expertise in their customers, to evaluate whether our solution would be effective. This was done by interviewing three experts, one from Innovation, one from Business Development and a former bank advisor. We also tested our user group for usability in our application, using the System Usability Scale. Through the experiments it was found, that many participants had issues using the application. Many different types of user interactions made it difficult for users to control the application, leading to decreased usability. Furthermore, while the experts did have many ideas for improvements, they generally saw a large potential in the application and its concept.

The cashless society have become more of a reality over the last years. Even though this improves convenience for the users, studies suggest that it does have negative side effects as well, such as people having a harder time keeping an overview of their financials. Many business applications have been developed to solve this problem, where some uses gamification. These applications solve some of the issues, by helping the user to get an overview of the financials. However, even though the applications provide the tools to get a better overview of their financials, they do little in terms of motivating users to log in frequently and use these tools. The aim for this study is to investigate whether an application with a large focus on the gamification aspect, will help motivate the users to log in frequently, and thereby increase their financial overview. As legal issues makes it difficult to access the users banking information for a test, we decided to use the Spar Nord Banks expertise in their customers, to evaluate whether our solution would be effective. This was done by interviewing three experts, one from Innovation, one from Business Development and a former bank advisor. We also tested our user group for usability in our application, using the System Usability Scale. Through the experiments it was found, that many participants had issues using the application. Many different types of user interactions made it difficult for users to control the application, leading to decreased usability. Furthermore, while the experts did have many ideas for improvements, they generally saw a large potential in the application and its concept.

Gamification ; E-banking ; Meaningful Play ; Spar Nord ; Mobile Banking ; Mobile

Download
View record in AAU Student Projects