Observing individuals of all shapes and sizes using financial services sites on the web over the years has been a thought-provoking experience.
I wanted to set down here on some initial thoughts on themes that have emerged for me in the hopes of revisiting them from time to time in this blog and my career.
In this day and age when most people are expected to plan for their own retirement without the mythical company pension or the surety of a social security safety net, it is more critical than ever that each and every one of us has the ability to make safe, solid decisions about managing money.
Some of the factors that come into play:
- the availability of appropriate, cleanly presented data describing a financial product
- user’s own financial literacy (competence)
- user’s attitude about their own ability to manage money (confidence)
- the quality of decision support (context, help)
In the context of usability testing and project kick-offs, I’ve been involved in a fair number of discussion focused on addressing the competence dynamic. Do our site’s users have the right basic knowledge about accounts and market? Do they have reasonable expectations about their needs? Do they have the analytical skills to compare and select the best options for themselves?
During development, most discussions center around the practicalities of ensuring that the information and experience provided on a site make it possible for individuals to make informed decisions or apples-to-apples comparisons between products.
My subjective testing observations are that even in the cases where all the “right” information is available and the user has reasonable competence, there is a vast difference in how successful people actually are in making decisions about financial products and transactions. You can tune, and tune, and tune – and still the spread persists.
I’ve come to the theory that a key unaddressed factor in explaining this gap – the hidden saboteur of the best laid plans of product managers, designers and developers for promoting user’s actual success – is neither confidence nor competence alone, but the emotional intersection of the two.
A knowledgeable, competent individual who does not have confidence that they are taking the right action can fail as seriously as a confident individual who overestimate their knowledge.
Ethically, I believe we have an institutional responsibility (leaving what combination of institutions – government, community, or corporate – open for the moment) to define what constitutes user success with financial services much more holistically than we do today and to have an open discussion about whose responsibility it is to ensure success. I also would like to believe that as a society, we all benefit from individuals being successful with their own money management in the same way that we benefit as a society from a physically healthy population.
Food for thought:
The 2009 National Financial Capability Study
http://www.finrafoundation.org/resources/research/p120478
See especially Section 4: Financial Knowledge and Decision Making.
Study on Future Self-Continuity and Savings
“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving”
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/1/85.abstract
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