Facilitating Game-Based Design in Personal Finance : The Design Process and Framework of Gamification Design in Personal Saving

Abstract: Personal financial health determines the majority of daily decisions, but managing it could be uninspiring, stressful and at times hard to insist, which is especially challenging for those without professional financial knowledge and chrematistic habits. Gamification is introduced as the approach to simplify the financial terminology and employs game design elements to impel the users to engage more efforts into managing personal finance. This study aims at applying a participatory design approach to gamify a financial saving service, employed with design activities including an online survey, interviews, ideation workshops, prototyping and usability tests in the research process. The findings exposed the current primary pain points in personal savings including nebulous or evening missing of the saving goals, deficient in saving knowledge and lack of social information, which guided the three gamification settings and interactive gamified systems. The gamification design guidance in personal saving was proposed in two facets, where the gamification design process was concluded as finding the triggers, defining the target users, proposing gamification settings, gamifying interactive systems and evaluating the prototype, the gamification design framework was generalized in four gamification settings and user types. The results would guide the design process and streamline the future gamification design work in the personal financial domain, which would attach the efficiency and integration to the application of gamification in personal saving.