(Test card reads: WBT our users will find the anthropomorphic mascot to be encouraging and useful in helping them remember to log their finances. To verify that, we will have participants send us ‘emotion’ photos like we had in our intervention study throughout the day and text them back the status of their ‘pet’ based on their ‘streaks’. At the end of the day, we will ask them basic questions about the feelings that the pets and their streaks evoked … and measure qualitatively how users felt about the mascot and their perceived levels of having been encouraged to record their spending. We are right if participants indicate positive attitudes towards this gamified approach along with negative to less enthusiastic attitudes towards traditional tracking.)
We recruited college-age participants, since our target demographic is young adults of approximately our age. We didn’t ask any other screening questions, since our target demographic is broad, and can be used by a wide variety of people for various reasons.
(Test card reads: WBT showing participants cats in response to financial loggings will elicit positive attitudes towards this gamified approach along with negative to less enthusiastic attitudes towards traditional tracking. Users will be more likely to log due to these positive emotions. We observed students’ positive responses to these cat responses. Students verbalized that “this [exercise] gave him the feeling that we are encouraging him to spend more money”, since by logging more spending he got more response from the cat. Others felt the cat brought a lightness to a heavy topic in a way that they liked. From that we learned that there needs to be a clear distinction between the cat being praise for spending and the cat being encouragement for awareness. Therefore, we will develop a clear input-cat reaction pipeline in the app that communicates to the user that the goal is awareness and logging, not spending more money. We will make our app’s messaging hyper-clear about awareness and not penalize the person too much for not logging. Positive reinforcement!)
