Influencing Financial Decision-Making through Human-Computer Interaction Design Intervention

Society is increasingly dependent on the use of technology to facilitate transactions and guide individual decision-making. The ubiquity of computing technology and its great availability to the population at large within recent decades have made computers indispensable for many common tasks. An understudied area with respect to how computers influence and affect judgment is financial decision-making. Work discussed in this dissertation deals with consumer financial decision-making, specifically in the context of retirement saving. Researchers in fields such as behavioral economics have studied financial decision-making at length and such studies have examined mechanisms to improve retirement saving largely independent of technological design interventions. In contrast, researchers in fields such as human-computer interaction have studied technological design interventions to change decision-making behavior, but little work has focused on financial decision-making. In the field of human-computer interaction work specifically related to consumer financial matters such as retirement saving is scarce. Moreover, much work within human-computer interaction with respect to decision-making and user interface design is qualitative research conducted on a limited set of subjects. This dissertation addresses this research gap by connecting research and theory of how to influence decision-making with research and theory of how technology can be used to persuade and influence individuals in beneficial ways. While the studies discussed in this dissertation include select qualitative findings, the influential nature of the design interventions discussed are primarily corroborated with larger scale quantitative studies that complement the qualitative findings. The overarching research question of this dissertation and the studies included is: How can long-term financial decision-making be influenced with technological design interventions---informed by economic and social science theory---to improve retirement saving behavior and outcomes? The research discussed in this dissertation focuses specifically on long-term retirement saving over the course of an individual's career and how technology can be used to incentivize and improve retirement saving. A number of mechanisms are used to affect retirement decision-making including: applying behavioral economic theory to user interface design, applying human-computer interaction research to the presentation of financial information, and applying research from social computing to obtain and display crowdsourced data for the purpose of influencing users.