THE DESIGN OF A MOBILE APP TO PROMOTE YOUNG PEOPLE’S DIGITAL FINANCIAL LITERACY

Abstract

Purpose: With the popularity of Digital Financial Services (DFS), Digital Financial Literacy learning has been positioned as an essential ingredient for filling in people’s knowledge gaps and achieving their lifelong financial well-being. Therefore, this capstone project developed a mobile app to promote people’s digital financial literacy. As a pilot study, it specifically focused on content design and delivery design in accordance with the young generation’s needs. Theory: The author formulated a conceptual model of the app on the basis of Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987), which presents a holistic system of mobile learning with a set of elements (i.e. artifacts, subjects, and objectives). Beyond that, the notion of “digital nudges” (Caraban et al., 2019; Weinmann et al., 2016) was adopted in an effort to reduce users’ cognitive overload and sustain their engagement throughout the entire learning journey. Method: This capstone project applied the methodology of Design Thinking (DT) to design the mobile app. It went through five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Results: In the content design, this study found that it is necessary to develop tailored content from a demand-side, which involves elaborating on DFS jargon, practical strategies for appropriate DFS use, as well as risks and rewards of DFS. With the provision of these content, young people are more likely to make well-informed decisions, and enhance their overall level of digital financial literacy. In the delivery design, the study discovered that cognitive overload is a demanding challenge for potential users. Particularly, DFS put an extra layer of complexity to people’s cognitive processes. It requires us to think about a set of strategies to nudge users overcoming this challenge: 1) build on a good pedagogy to design the mobile learning for digital financial literacy initiatives; 2) exploit facilitator nudges to keep learning chunks small and easy-to understand; 3) incorporate spark nudges to enhance users’ learning motivation; 4) embody signal nudges to navigate the entire learning journey; 5) add inquiry nudges to provide the scaffolding anywhere anytime.