Emotional design for financial apps: how we make people smile
When you are picturing a financial app in your head, what are you seeing? Boring numbers? Monotonous cold colors? Or dreary tasks you need to deal with?
Personal finance is getting too serious today. We think users want something that is functional and maximize efficiency. Also, it should appear to be professional, reliable, and straight to the point. Most of the products inherited the personality of the old system — the financial institution and the clerk in the suit. Those elements alienated the products from the people who are using them and barely make them smile.
Does this matter? You might say, people, are just wanting to the job done.
In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Don Norman mentioned that positive emotions enable you to work better by increasing creativity when coming up with solutions and helping to see the whole picture.
Whether an object is aesthetically pleasing does influence people’s performance when using it.
We are programmed to be having positive or negative emotions about certain things. Don Norman has a long list for them, including … and poops. And I want to add one more to each of them, bank reception office and amusement park. So why don’t we turn the personal finance app into an amusement park? Why must the information be shown in an intimidating and dull fashion with long lists of numbers and abstruse graphs?
Of course, Technology is here to help us ditch the spreadsheets and embrace automation, it should also spice up the journey and put smiles on our faces. This is when emotional design can come to play, emotional design is the concept of how designers can evoke positive emotions and create pleasant experiences for the users on three cognitive levels — visceral, behavioral, and reflective. In another word, people feel good about the product and themselves when seeing it, using it, and thinking about it.
Humanize it
When you have some questions related to your personal finance, who would you turn to? A professional you trust might be your first choice. Sometimes people even bother to ask their friends about certain information when they can get an answer from the system. So why not add a personality to our product? With a character, the product should have its own way of communicating with the users and the visual need to externalize the character across the screens. To evoke positive emotions, the personality should be warm, kind, reliable, or even goofy. It can be a human or an animal, as long as it’s able to build the image that makes users willing to rely on it. Throughout the whole process, the character should feel what the user feels and respond correspondingly, to assure users that the product can understand their emotions and empathize with them.
Create wow-experience
The wow is explained as a combination of fascination, pleasant surprise, and desire. We have spending years to understand what will persuade people to buy the product, the same way as designers and product managers want to know what will drive conversion. We want the moments when users clearly know they emotionally want the product even before they are aware that they rationally need it. This instinctive emotion-driven impulse is much stronger than the one that has gone through the deliberate thought process, thus has a better chance to lead to the payment. The wow-experience here is a bit different from the aha moment which normally indicates the moment when the user perceives the value of the product. Besides utilization, wow-experience is more about the emotions, how people feel. There are multiple ways to achieve this: the exciting Ka-ching sounds, the sudden pop-up of confetti, the smiley face saying something encouraging and nice, progress bars and growing graphs, etc.
Add the softness and joyfulness to the interface
When people are dealing with their finances, their minds are often highly intense and uneasy. Such as human nature, we are not really into managing our expenses, taxes, or debts. Seeing those numbers, especially for the ones that imply heavy burdens and stresses, people might feel repulsive and uneasy. So that's why we want to soothe users on the visceral level by adding joyfulness and richness to our UI. When you are crafting the UI, you are giving your product a character. If you want to make the character more friendly, harmless, and sympathetic, like a Pooh Bear, you probably want to apply the round corners to your card design and use the round buttons. Also, don’t be afraid of trying some bright colors, like yellow or light blue if your target user group is quite young.
Another thing that might be easily ignored is the rhythm of your layout, how much information you want to allocate to a certain area, and how much space you want to give between each section, They all influence how people’s attentions are going to flow at what speed and do they have time to breathe? It all goes hand in hand with the character you are building. So you probably do not want too much information and numbers are squeezed into a small area, thus making users feel too pushing and aggressive.
Rich and poor, we all use financial apps more or less. People who are struggling financially, are especially in need of care and support from the services/products. Let’s create more financial products that can make people smile, that’s not just about emotional design, but also about inclusivity.
