The Numbers Don’t Add Up
Pythagorus is famously quoted as saying “numbers rule the universe.” We attempt to use numbers to make large portions of our lives make sense. Whether you’re budgeting for a highly inflationary world, calculating ‘personal risk’ based on the latest Covid statistics or making sense of a hot housing market, a little bit of maths goes a long way.
According to data published by National Numeracy, only around half of the working-age population of England have the numeracy level of primary school children — or worse. Adults may not be able to understand their payslips, understand price labels, do simple percentages and fractions or convert units of measure. All skills which are only going to get more important as businesses move from human customer service to self-serve digital services.
The past decade has seen swaths of improvement in the UX of digital services; business are compelled by both regulation and a drive for inclusion. Dark patterns still exist, ways businesses try to squeeze extra pounds out of you without informed knowledge or consent. Thankfully, the government and wider industry have realised this predatory practice is not only bad for customers, it’s bad for business. You can’t win back customers who feel like they’ve been cheated — they take their business elsewhere and tell their friends to avoid you like the plague.
With the onset of Covid-19, cancelling direct debits or paying bills has never been easier. Was this possible before the pandemic? Most likely. Why wasn’t it made as easy as it is now? You can speculate that some businesses were trying to take advantage of customers through the addition of red tape, phone lines, emails, web-forms, 28-day deadlines, small print… the list goes on. It’s one thing to make using a service easy and accessible; making it understandable is another. We might present information such as statements and balances in an increasingly comprehensible way. Big fonts, nice colour schemes, hitting the accessibility criteria square on the nose. You can make an app as accessible as ever. But if users can’t do the math, it’s pointless.
But if customers don’t understand the numbers, if they can’t calculate their percentages, then the design doesn’t matter. With the growth of BNPL, customers might end up juggling a lot of mental maths, as present purchases become translated into the promise of future payments. Vulnerable customers may then get into situations they don’t understand. The same goes for any industry. If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.
We have people with learning disabilities working in good jobs but who may have purchased products or services that they may not necessarily understand. The next step in financial accessibility must be numerical literacy.
The issue is amplified by the potential of moving into a completely cashless society in future. The concern is that, with no cold hard cash, the money signifier — the note, the coin, the cheque — simply becomes cold hard numbers. The genius of the note is that you can assign meaning to it. Many visual learners are adept at understanding numeracy by shapes and textures. “Give me five bees for a quarter!” as Grandpa Simpson says. The materiality of money helps one to understand its very value.
Can we communicate beyond numbers? The combination of the Metaverse with mobile banking may well help with the cognition of numbers. We learn and understand numbers through interacting with them — the Metaverse unlocks new ways to manipulate numbers in a semi-tactile way.
Mobile banking apps, after all, are at their core, just good looking spreadsheets. Even though the majority of banks go far beyond this with smart features that have helped us hang up the phone and leave branches behind, little is done to make the numbers make sense.
Just like the traffic light system on food to indicate salt, fat and calories, a traffic light system that helps users understand the health of their finances could help a user’s numerical literacy when it comes to money management.
As credit becomes increasingly available to larger swathes of the population, another factor comes into play — time. If people are struggling to make sense of the numbers now, adding an extra dimension without taking the time to explain the basics could be catastrophic.
