It's Accrual World
A choose your own adventure banking game to help educate young Americans on financial health and resilience.
An MCAD MAGWD Capstone Project
Designed by Grace Deck, Summer 2021
An MCAD MAGWD Capstone Project
Designed by Grace Deck, Summer 2021
The financial landscape is complex with bloated jargon, confusing figures and a contentious history. It's Accrual World aims to help young Americans make sense of the financial industry in a choose your own adventure banking game. The game grounds players in character scenarios to build financial health, literacy and resilience as they navigate real-world financial decisions through the characters' lens.
This choose your own adventure game format was largely inspired by how my mom walked me through budgeting for colleges many years ago. She set up scenarios of the different schools I was looking at and showed me what my student loan payment would be for each school, against potential projected salaries to understand what I could really afford. She has always encouraged me to keep my options open and that dreams can come in different ways and on budget.
Could a choose your own adventure game help…
In the beginning I focused on reading and watching as many resources as I could to understand the history of banking in the United States and where we’re at today.
I wanted to have a rudimentary understanding of the ins and outs of the financial industry to be able to write well-informed character scenarios
To understand the logic of the game, I created user flows for the three characters I created to map out their different decisions and pain points. This is where my initial research was valuable to help craft the story lines of the three characters.
I ran through three rounds of user feedback where I had users play a few rounds of the game and answer a survey of questions. I tested with my target audience of 17-22, my Linkedin connections and two expert financial tech designers. For the most part everyone liked learning about finances in a game format and found my design pretty easy to use but that the content wasn’t that valuable or new.
Key themes I saw from the feedback were:
Equipped with valuable user feedback and wireframes I moved into visual design next. I took a methodical approach making sure to build up a style guide as I went so that as users play they can really focus in on the storyline without worrying about overly designed elements or inconsistently placed actions.
It was really important to me to be able to code this game, so my last and final step was development. I stretched my skills in CSS variables and animation, HTML5 and ensuring the game is responsive across devices.
This project has pushed me as a designer and helped me make sense of not only my own financial journey as a millenial going through a few recessions, but also making sense of the current financial landscape and how important the movement for financial justice is.
My hope with It’s Accrual World is to share my learnings and growth interactively to help someone else learn and build their own financial health, resilience and role in helping the financial industry be more equitable.
