Stratford School Professor Lennart Nacke Receives $30k Mitacs Accelerate Grant

Stratford School Professor Lennart Nacke Receives $30k Mitacs Accelerate Grant

Lennart Nacke, Associate Professor at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business and Director of the HCI Games Group at the Games Institute, has recently been awarded a $30k grant from Mitacs in partnership with TD Bank. The grant will research ways in which gamification, meaning applying game elements to traditional, non-game contexts and systems, can assist in improving debt management and changing spending habits, specifically through gameful user experience design and visual rhetoric. 

Credit card debt is a rising issue for many Canadians – The Financial Post reported that 53% of surveyed Canadians had little to no expendable income, and 25% of those surveyed reported feeling that their debt was overwhelming. In response to this mounting issue, this project will investigate gameful ways to aid TD Bank customers in avoiding credit card debt by researching methods to encourage timely repayments and responsible spending habits through improved visualized feedback of customer spending habits. 

This project will seek to answer some key research questions: How can we change a consumer’s spending habits, ideally toward debt reduction and debt avoidance? Does gameful design affect the consumer experience and spending habits? Does the visual rhetoric affect the consumer experience and spending habits? 

“This emerging line of gamification research in finance is essential because it studies the ways in which financial service providers like TD can improve customer satisfaction, user experience, and service design,” says Nacke. “We propose that if this project can help consumers change their spending habits and understand debt management, it can be beneficial to any bank by assisting consumers in making educated decisions and help promote healthy spending,” he continues. 

Rather than transforming TD’s banking platforms into game-like applications, this project will seek to garner some gameful design elements which could subsequently be used to transform interactions and understanding within TD’s existing digital platforms.

Ultimately, the project seeks to develop a prototype based on TD’s existing online web service platform, EasyWeb. If the initial findings of this project prove promising, and the partners involved wish to extend this partnership, Nacke and his team will be able to further evaluate the design concept through formal user research and by means of user testing.