Choosing Your Financial Future

Intuit x UPenn: May–July 2022

Challenge

Can virtual and augmented reality (VR & AR) environments prompt better long-term financial decision making?

Research on intertemporal choice has shown that the more real the future (and our future self) feels to us, the more likely we are to make choices that benefit our future self. Scientists are learning how we can use technology to make the future feel more tangible in order to elicit better decision making.

For my Master's Thesis, I investigated how my client could be uniquely situated to use emerging tech to help their customers make decisions their future selves would be happy with.

Team

Dana Kimmelman, UX Researcher:

Research proposal and plan, secondary literature review, survey stimuli design and QA, data cleaning, analysis, and visualization, final presentation and recommendations

Jackie Porter, Sr. Behavioral Scientist:

Project leader: Mentorship & SME guidance; subject recruitment; survey QA and launch; data cleaning, analysis, and visualization

Dr. Hal Hershfield: Expert consultation & QA; author of foundational studies on which our research was based

study design

I designed an RCT for 800 subjects, with 3 treatment conditions and a control group in order to determine which future-self–oriented treatments would influence our outcome variable: hypothetical allocation of income from 3 different sources.

Treatments and stimuli were chosen based on:

Secondary research including behavioral finance, present bias, hyperbolic discounting, self-continuity, retirement savings behavior, experimentation in virtual reality, emotional responses to aging
Consultation with academic and industry experts in behavioral science and virtual reality
1 in-depth interview with a member of our target demographic in virtual reality using Horizon Workrooms (further interviews were unable to be completed due to budget constraints)
4+ pilot surveys to ensure clarity, validity, and accessibility of study content

TOOLS & MEASURES

Qualtrics survey design
Amazon Mechanical Turk & Prolific
R & RStudio
Oculus Quest 2 headset
Bitmoji & FaceApp software
Outcome Measures: Proportion of $1,000 allocated to savings categories for each income source
Manipulation Measure: Degree of empathy felt toward future self

Final deliverables

Data analysis and visualization
Distilled insights and implications for the internal team
Recommendations and outlines for further quantitative analysis and qualitative research

Please note that only selected images and data are shown to protect client's business interests and research subjects' privacy

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