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“Banking has to work when and where you need it. The best advice and the best service in financial services happens in real time and is based on customer behavior, using principles of Big Data, mobility, and gamification!”
― Brett King, CEO and co-founder of Moven
The past decade was all about socializing and having good representation online. We’ve witnessed the creation, broad adaptation, and popularization of social apps like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The next logical step in the evolution of the internet seems to be gamification. The gamification dynamics are everywhere. In our opinion, this derives from the notion that we tend to want to simplify our lives, have fun, transform every boring and mundane activity like working, dealing with finances, or buying online into a game. What’s more: with the emergence of the web we also want everything instantly. Ask yourself why you haven’t done a number of activities you were planning to do yet. The answer probably is because they either are too complicated (consist of too many sub activities) or they are repetitive and boring.
Keeping in mind all these facts, companies apply the psychological aspects mentioned above while building applications or websites paying close attention to their User Experience (UX) design. All these big dot com corporations started to wonder why games are so immersive and whether there are any design elements that can be applied to their fields of business. This resulted in gamification. The term is often misunderstood as a lot of companies on the way to increase sales are falling behind the global trend. Gamification, in our opinion, is aimed at improving user experience of interaction with the product or service. By the way, that’s what drives AR and VR – both are dealing with user experiences.
On the way to improve user experiences several aspects of gamification can be applied to anything, let’s say an app, for example. Built-in challenges, scores and leaderboards invoke a sense of competition, bringing user experience to the next level. Users are no longer just completing the activity, but attempt to improve their performance and achieve higher scores, competing with others. Being a leader opens more opportunities inside the app, being a leader creates an image of experience and increases retention. The opinion of a leader is taken into consideration, making them a person of interest and increasing one’s perception of self worth. Thanks to the social aspect, huge networks of people bound together by one story, one app and one goal, form communities that are loyal brand ambassadors. Another interesting feature that can be taken from games and implemented into a business model – constraints. They can take different forms, one such constraint is time, time during which a user is eligible for a better deal, special access or various bonuses. However, the most powerful feature is fun. The main reason people play games in any sphere is to have fun. User experience needs to become fun, with cool elements and interesting features. The main pitfall, though, is to balance the game and product into one offer.
There is still a lot to explore, but the gamification framework is already here. We want it to be accessible and productive down the road. Gamification in UX is about using dynamics as forces to improve users’ experience and to change their behavior.
With the pace of our lives increasing by the day and technology providing the infrastructure needed to accommodate this change, it is only natural that we want to have access to everything at our fingertips. This desire is fueling the market for thousands of mobile applications. It seems there is an app for everything these days, here are just a few of the most recognizable examples: socializing – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, dating – Tinder, photos – Instagram and Pinterest, payments –PayPal, e-commerce – Ebay and Amazon.
Today, when UX is booming, companies are forced to compete not only in tech innovation but also on how accessible and user friendly this innovation is.
It’s no surprise that fintech has caught up with the trend. The market demands features that every financial service should include in their user experience.
First and foremost, financial platforms should alleviate the financial burden cultivating healthy financial habits. For instance, a platform for personal finances like Mint. Its UX design embodied the recap feature. One more feature of cultivating healthy habits is positive reinforcement. That stands for rewarding users on completing some milestones on the way to predefined results.
Since the financial industry is pretty convoluted, it becomes vital for fintech providers to translate complex financial data into understandable information, providing valid explanations under financial metrics and odds. This can be easily achieved through the use of visualization. Taking Acorns, a robo adviser, for instance; all graphs are presented in an attractive interface, where figures are interactive, providing users with broad understanding of correlations between financial indexes.
It’s important to remember that every action within a system should be performed with complete certainty that the user understands what exactly he/she is doing and what the outcome will be. Multi-factor authentication, pop-ups confirming significant financial actions can mitigate user mistakes and prevent irreversible actions.
Talking about applications in the financial industry you will probably think of wallets, banking apps, personal finance trackers etc. What about stock exchanges, do they seem user friendly and easy to use? My guess is, if you are not a professional trader, those things are very intimidating.
NAGA, a German fintech company, is amongst the first companies to address this issue with their SwipeStox app, a social app for traders. Here is what they did: they adopted the swiping interface from Tinder to one of the most serious and complicated industries – trading. Every trade is organized as a card. Every user is given a choice to either discard it, copy it or to add it to their watch list, to to keep an eye out for its performance and decide how to act on it later. Swiping is the same as in Tinder, so users can easily jump from app to app, performing the same swiping strategy: left – discard, right – “like”. With this app NAGA has proven that clever UX and gamification can literally be applied to anything, even to something as complex as stock market trading.
NAGA’s team hasn’t stopped their development with that success. They started wondering how users could benefit from uniting applications from different spheres, what synergy effect can come as a result.
The latest global trend is the adaptation of blockchain technologies. In line with this, NAGA has begun the development of an ecosystem that can bridge the gap between various business sectors: the stock market with SwipeStox, virtual goods with their ongoing project Switex, and crypto-currencies with their NGC token. The NAGA ecosystem will grant access to the financial world of stocks and securities to those who experienced limitations in trying to do this in the past. The ecosystem will unlock opportunities to trade various assets such as Forex, ETFs, Index CFDs, Stock CFDs, commodities, futures, virtual goods, crypto and, moreover, to convert them between each other within one ecosystem. The fuel of this ecosystem is their very own NGC token, a unique currency that binds together all tech solutions within one ecosystem and makes it possible to jump from asset to asset easily. Together with NGC, NAGA is developing a special application that will complete all storing and exchange functions – the NAGA Wallet.
At the moment NAGA has already closed their pre-sale for NGC tokens with 18,500,00 million NGC sold, with over $15,000,000 raised from more than 15,000 backers.
Now the main sale is live at NAGA token sale. Don’t miss it out!
NGC can now be bought for $1, and the prediction is that once it is listed on the best exchanges that the price will quickly spike to around $4,5. Don’t miss out on your chance to become part of a company that is innovating one of the oldest industries in the world..!
Got questions? Ask them in their Telegram were NAGA has more than 8500 active members.