Money talks

Abstract

How do people keep track of their money? In this paper we present a preliminary scoping study of how 14 individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area earn, save, spend and understand money and their personal and family finances. We describe the practices we developed for exploring the sensitive topic of money, and then discuss three sets of findings. The first is the emotional component of the relationship people have with their finances. Second, we discuss the tools and processes people used to keep track of their financial situation. Finally we discuss how people account for the unknown and unpredictable nature of the future through their financial decisions. We conclude by discussing the future of studies of money and finance in HCI, and reflect on the opportunities for improving tools to aid people in managing and planning their finances.

Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking

“…Clinically-informed studies suggest that paper dairies are feasible and usable data collection tools [64], especially when tailored to chronic conditions and research settings [61]. Studies in HCI indicate that individuals prefer the flexibility and tangibility of paper notebooks over digital products, when technology appropriation is perceived as an effortful barrier, and when poor design causes critical incidents and does not meet security and privacy needs [3,23,33].…”

“…The use of paper journals remains common practice, as research studies within and beyond personal informatics suggest [3,23,26,33]. [7] exemplifies how organisation of, searching in, and reflecting on paper notebooks can be digitally supported.…”

“…However, the design of automated self-tracking technologies lacks flexibility [36] and often fails to support people's practical goals and emotional needs. For example, prior works suggest that people abandon consumer health technologies over time because of a lack of personally meaningful insights [22,38], and switch to paper notebooks to avoid unintended effects and to overcome technological boundaries [3,33]. Addressing these issues, recent research has proposed leveraging flexible self-tracking to account for people's individual and changing self-tracking practices [10,30,36].…”

Recipes for Programmable Money

“…Much of this work has highlighted how the ways in which money is designed, and represented, has consequences for its situated use [12,13,17,31,32]. Given that finance is a topic that is often starkly rationalized and quantitatively driven, HCI research has -in contrast -done much to recognize the emotional, qualitative, personal and social aspects of money and has included a call to "design financial systems that fit in with existing everyday practices rather than idealized notions of optimizing financial affairs" ( [15], p.530). Vyas et al 's ethnographic study of household finances [42] for instance, noted the "artful and creative ways people incorporate their social lives into financial activities".…”

“…Vyas et al 's ethnographic study of household finances [42] for instance, noted the "artful and creative ways people incorporate their social lives into financial activities". The work of Kaye, Vyas and Vines [15,[40][41][42] among others working across cultural contexts [2,17,23] also highlights how new technologies can often flatten out or overlook many of these important distinctions and nuances in how money is actually used. Zelizer [45] offers a conceptual framing for such reflections.…”