CHLOE MARTEN
QUANT HUMANISTS
SPRING 2018
05 03 2018
Within the last couple of years, I have gotten into the habit of automatically saving. I set up automatic transfers on the day of my paycheck to various saving and investing accounts to ensure it is out of sight, and I won’t spend it. Recently, I have been investing more actively. I find I enjoy it, but sometimes I get quite obsessive about it: watching the prices fluctuate, reading tons of breaking market news, and viewing my balance changes over time. Sometimes this leads me to make quick sell/buy decisions, which usually do not end in my favor.
I find that my obsessiveness is fed by easy access to my investment accounts. I can easily check with the touch of my thumb my Robinhood or TD Ameritrade accounts at any time during the day. It has turned into a mindless habit, replacing my previous social media habits. Most of the time when I check my accounts, I am not planning on making any trades. I am just checking my balances to see how much I lost or gained. This can be stressful if it is a down day, and that stress is unnecessary if I am not planning on taking any action.
In order to curb my mindless balance checking, it would be useful to have a setting that restricts my account views. I explored how this may look in the Robinhood app.
In the app Settings, users would have the option to set certain restrictions around their account usage. For my particular case, it would be account visits. I would be able to set the parameters around how many times I should visit my account per day. For more active traders, this is probably not a setting they would utilize, but there are probably other parameters that could help investors better handle their accounts. Some initial thoughts: trading restrictions for those who trade excessively or transfer restrictions for those who transfer out money too often.
Once the view setting is enabled, the app would monitor how many times I visited the app that day. When I get close to my limit it would alert me of my status, and when I hit my limit it would lock me out of the app entirely. I believe having this setting would force me to be more mindful about when and why I am checking my investment accounts.
Thanks for your thoughtful design intervention. You clearly identified a personal pain point and developed a simple, but realistic solution to help you create more mindfulness regarding your stock trades. A great insight was that you picked up that often times you check your info without the intention to act on the presented information. In what ways do you think that the company (e.g. RobinHood - great name btw) could (ab)use the monitoring of your app behavior? Could such behavioral tracking create data derivatives that could prove to be lucrative for such a company? Would analytic provided by such a service push you to act more (i.e. make more trades)?
Your project brought up some great discussion also on the future of designing personal interventions that help to manage addictive habits and the technologies that exploit the Ludic Loop. To what extent do companies have an ethical responsibility to consider the types of healthy/unhealthy habits that their technologies produce?