NOVA’S FINANCIAL LAB

Client: NOVA

Goal: Design an online game that helps students to increase their financial well-being through developing healthy financial habits.

Demographic: 16-18 year old students, as well as people who are starting to get their first source of income.

Teams:

Platform: Web-based, optimized for mobile

Project Summary: The need for financial literacy has generated many educational materials over the years, most focused on financial knowledge and tools. However, few, if any, have demonstrated significant effects on subsequent financial behavior. We believe this is because real-world conditions are too complex for people to use the right strategies at the right time. In addition, they fail to acknowledge unconscious biases and how past experiences influence our current behavior.

NOVA’s Financial Lab seeks to help students increase their financial well-being by targeting these unconscious biases. Collaborating with behavioral researchers at Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight (CAH), we aim to use the latest insights to narrow the intention-behavior gap, helping players to develop healthy financial habits.

Each mini-game targets a bias that a player might face when making financial decisions, such as opportunity cost neglect, mental accounting, and exponential growth bias. Through repeated play, students will develop and practice strategies to overcome them. The Financial Lab will serve as a testbed for research, providing insights into how to cultivate healthy financial behavior in the real world.

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Contributions

  1. Coordinated creative vision of the NOVA Labs team, external development team in Toronto, and research partners at Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight

  2. Managed project scope and budget tracking

  3. Facilitated meetings among teams and key leadership

  4. Developed and managed overall production schedule, prioritizing and assigning tasks to internal team

  5. Conducted research on topic matter and synthesized main takeaways

  6. Developed and pitched overall narrative and game concepts

  7. Co-designed games with game designers, scientists, and educators

  8. Helped to conduct playtests with students and summarize key takeaways

  9. Scripted, fact-checked, filmed (remote), and animated educational videos

Challenges

  1. Narrowing down scope.

    After scope creep on the Exoplanet Lab, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t run into the same issues again. However, deciding how to scope down this project proved challenging, as many pieces of financial knowledge and cognitive biases are intertwined.

  2. Simulating tensions of real world spending.

    In the real world, temptations for spending are everywhere! Students report that they spend the most amount of money on food, and also the purchase they regret most is, unsurprisingly, food! However, virtual food isn’t much of a temptation. So how do we tempt the player into making bad financial choices?

  3. Inclusive design.

    From the onset of this project, we knew that it was important to recognize that socioeconomic status and cultural differences impact the way that we handle money. Finances are a topic that most people feel uncomfortable talking about and can trigger many negative emotions, especially when advice is unrelatable.

  4. Making finance fun!

    Let’s be real. Most people don’t like to talk about finances, let alone play a game about them. So how do we make this fun?

Solutions

  1. Divide and Conquer.

    To reduce branching narratives in the game, we decided to split the game into three mini-games that each target a specific cognitive bias. Each mini-game represents a simplified version of a real world financial situation in which this bias might appear. The mini-games are designed such that the player can practice identifying and overcoming the bias. 

  2. Iteration.

    Iteration is key! We developed almost 10 different versions of each mini-game. Working closely with our researchers to understand the behavioral concepts and then with our designers to gamify the concept.

  3. Seeking Advisors.

    Recognizing that our team lacked diversity, we reached out to financial experts that work with young BIPOC students to build financial well-being. Working with Pockets Change and MissBeHelpful, we were able to have a better understanding of how to talk about finance in a way that is relatable and inclusive to students from different backgrounds. 

  4. Designing With Our Audience.

    The easiest way to make something fun for your audience, is to design with your audience. We held a workshop with teens from Girls LEAP and distributed multiple surveys to understand how teens spend money, what they’re interested in learning about, and how to make it fun.