Looking at money

I have spent a lot of time over the past decade, building interfaces to complex systems of information. Sometimes the complexity had to be expressed, sometimes elided, sometimes abstracted. (And of course of the three, the last was always the hardest. It is also what was usually required)

I have started seeing user interface problems everywhere now, and not just where a screen is involved. Some are solved badly: care labels on clothes, pill strips and buying concert tickets online. And some well: the London underground (ask any tourist), physical notebooks and the one this post is about: Cash.

As far as money in your pocket goes, it’s hard to beat cash. It can be inconvenient to use, but the friction from that inconvenience can be useful: for example if one wants to be more responsible with spending, or one wants to dodge information gathering (by banks, governments etc). Cash is pretty, tactile (multi-sensory in fact) and has in-built privacy. 

Of course, ‘money’ is much larger than cash. But as our everyday experience of money moves beyond cash, it becomes progressively harder to think about it. That intuitive tactile understanding slips from our grasp, literally.

Money is inescapable, and there is well, money in it. So naturally there are multiple technological attempts to alter humans’ relationship to money. 

There is of course the biggest one that aims to change governments’ relationship to money, in that it wants to do away with that relationship: crypto. Credit cards and loans are scary, along come ‘BNPL’ solutions. And then there are many (frankly excellent) challenger or ‘neo’ banks aimed at current and savings, Monzo in the UK being the biggest (and possibly best) example. Incumbent insurers are being attacked from every direction and there are companies building investment and wealth management tech.

“Wherever money is, time hides in plain sight.”

Leaving the very complex varied case of cryptocurrencies out from this discussion, all of the other ‘use cases’ of money: loans, investments, savings, even insurance have a common, major theme. It is a fundamental fact of life, even the universe which is inextricable from money:

That fact is Time.

Wherever money is, time hides in plain sight. This is possibly why it is an under-explored factor in all the attempts that have so far been made to change humans’ relationship with money. How money (or more specifically the value it represents) moves or changes over time is basically what all finance is. A lot of good ‘money habits’ hinge on one’s relationship with the future, the ability to clearly imagine it. But the non-immediate future for most of us is a fuzzy, intangible concept. And there is nothing that makes the tangible, intangible like a bit of good design.

But can design really allow people to ‘do money’, better; no less by way of modifying their relationship with time itself? Doesn’t that seem like a lofty goal being pursued with even loftier ideas?

I don’t think so. The last 15 years of interaction design has achieved quite significant shifts in human behaviour in relation to information about the world (social media), about themselves (fitness trackers and smart watches) and of course about money as well (see above). 

We have many examples of time in user interfaces. Often as a ‘timeline’ in editing software: linear, rewind and fast-forward-able. It can be shown emphasising milestones (the way some smartphones group photos by events). Or you can have an ‘artifact-centric’ view like Apple’s time machine, showing how things change (or changed) over time, instead of any element showing time as such.

This right here is a rich UX mega-problem, full of interesting opportunities. Think about it the next time you are looking at money, do you like what you see? 

I am going to leave this here for now but I will link any future posts that build on this one. You can send me your thoughts here.