📍 Presented this project at IndiaHCI 2023 Dehradun under Student Design Consortium

Pennywise: The Tax and Finance Board Game

A board game to help young adults learn about investing, saving, and taxation. Through this board game, people can learn about basic financial concepts like budgeting, bill paying, basic financial math skills, dealing with emergencies and more.

Project by

Team of 2, Navya S and Vishnu S

Timeline

7 weeks

Tools used

Miro, Figma

Role

Research and design

Summary

This board game was born out of a research on understanding financial awareness among young adults. During the research, participants of ages 18-25 years showed little to no awareness on saving, investing and taxation. Therefore, this board game focuses on all the three so that people can learn about basic financial concepts in a not-so-serious way. It is designed to teach players to invest the right way and also learn about taxes. It’s a multiplayer boardgame with around 2 to 4 players.

Process

Research

Brainstorming
Secondary research
Finalizing brief

Synthesis

Primary and secondary
Qualitative coding
Affinity map

Ideation

100 Ideas

Crazy 8's exercise

Storyboarding

Journey mapping

Persona

Prototype

Development of game mechanics Wireframe
Paper prototype
High-fidelity prototype
Playtesting

Secondary research

Literature review

Research was carried out individually. While I focussed on understanding the behaviors and attitudes of young adults towards personal finance and my team mate focused on understanding the level of awareness related to taxes. After brainstorming and reading news articles and research papers on financial literacy among teens and young adults, we could see there was a gap in this area.

Primary research

Based on the insights gathered from secondary research, I went ahead and developed probe tools to understand people's relationship with money. It had a set of activities where participants had to respond to either-or situation based questions.

I then conducted a semi-structured interview with a Certified Financial Planner to understand more about the scenario. Later, I prepared a discussion guide and consent forms and interviewed 5 participants above 25 to understand how their relationship with money changed from when they were a teen and when they started working to now. The interviews were recorded with their consent.

Meanwhile, Vishnu conducted focus group discussions with young adults to understand their views on taxes and also conducted expert interviews with two tax consultants.

Analysis

Based on the primary research, I could detect recurring patterns and used qualitative coding to mark recurring themes and group them together for conceptualizing the data. By adding codes to the data from the interviews, I was able to quantify the data.

Insights

Finding from the primary, led to the insights below:

Majority of the users’ found it hard to save money
Working adults have little to no knowledge on basic money management skills(saving, investing, spending)
Those who knew about investing, did not invest money due to lack of trust
Users learnt about money management only when they moved out of their homes and lived alone

Ideation

As a part of 100 ideas exercise, I came up with around 50+ unique ideas and also did Crazy 8's exercise (sketching 8 ideas in 8 minutes) to narrow down to one. It was during this phase we both wanted to do a game so we collaborated to work on ideating the game and building the prototype.

100 Ideas

Crazy 8's

Persona Building

Prototype

First, a paper prototype was drafted while simultaneously getting feedback from M Krishna S Menon, who is a game design expert. Soon after that, digital prototype was designed which was then printed.

Paper prototype

Digital prototype

Gameplay

Through the gameplay, players will encounter real-life challenges where each player begins with a fixed salary and navigates with the virtual money by making investment decisions, paying taxes, and building savings strategies. The player with the maximum savings is the winner.

We conducted a quiz with questions on fundamental personal finance concepts one before and after the game. It was evident that participants who initially had vague ideas about concepts like PPF, tax planning, stocks scored much better after playing the game.

With this, we aim to build practical knowledge on personal finance concepts. We also intend to provide young adults with basic personal finance skills while also offering educators a pedagogical tool to teach personal finance in a fun and interactive manner. By combining the worlds of finance, education and game design, Pennywise addresses the urgent need for improved financial literacy among young adults.