#About the episode
How does growing up in poverty impact our relationship with money and financial services? Lead content designer Ray Newman shares his lived experience.
We cover how poorer people pay more for essential services and goods (poverty premium), deceptive patterns, financial vulnerability, and access to digital services.
We discuss how assumptions and a lack of understanding of the realities of poverty can lead to non-inclusive and inaccessible services.
#Episode links
#Timestamps
01:17 (1 minute and 17 seconds)
Ray's experience with numbers
Ray shares his experience with numbers and how he copes with numbers as a content designer.
02:34 (2 minutes and 34 seconds)
Content designers and number anxiety
Laura and Ray discuss the prevalence of number anxiety among content designers and the strategies they use to manage it.
03:59 (3 minutes and 59 seconds)
Financial inclusion and poverty
Ray talks about his recent discussions on designing for people in poverty, sharing his own experiences growing up in poverty.
05:44 (5 minutes and 44 seconds)
The psychological impact of poverty
Ray delves into the psychological effects of growing up in poverty, including the anxiety and habits formed around money.
08:04 (8 minutes and 4 seconds)
Deceptive patterns and financial vulnerability
Laura and Ray discuss how people in poverty are vulnerable to deceptive patterns in services and the importance of transparency in pricing.
13:20 (13 minutes and 20 seconds)
Access to services and digital inclusion
The challenges of accessing services, the role of public spaces like libraries, and the impact of digital-only services on vulnerable populations.
19:11 (19 minutes and 11 seconds)
Financial habits and inclusion
Financial habits formed due to poverty, such as the reliance on cash and the challenges of digital payments.
25:26 (25 minutes and 26 seconds)
The role of organisations in financial inclusion
Ways organisations can practise financial inclusion, such as changing their mindset and being transparent about costs.
44:02 (44 minutes and 2 seconds)
Practical steps for inclusive design
Practical advice for designers on how to consider people living in poverty from the start of a project.
#About Ray Newman
Ray Newman is a content designer and design team leader at Sparck/BJSS. He's been working in design, marketing and communications for 25 years.
Recently he's been talking a lot about his own experience of growing up in poverty and how we can all do more to design services that work for people on low incomes.
#AI generated transcript
I’ve used AI to transcribe this episode. I’d love to pay a human to transcribe all my episodes but I can only pay for guests and editing currently.
You can sponsor a podcast episode or series. Email me at hello@lauraparker.design.
Laura (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Accessible Numbers Podcast, a show about designing services for people with Dyscalculia amass anxiety. I'm your host Laura, and I'm a content designer with lived experience. Today's guest is Ray Newman. Ray is a content designer and design team leader at Spark. He's been working in design for around 25 years and I think it shows really. Recently Ray's been talking about his own experience of growing up in poverty, an experience that I share with Ray and how we can do more to design services that work for people on low incomes, which is such a vital topic.
In this episode we talk about how growing up in poverty shapes how you feel about numbers, especially money, the poverty premium, and how poorer people end up paying more for essentials and how organisations can be financially inclusive.
If any of these subjects make you feel uneasy, feel free to skip this episode for now. For more on how to present numbers clearly, visit accessiblenumbers.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn or Bluesky by searching accessible numbers. I hope you enjoy the episode
Ray, welcome. How do numbers make you feel?
Ray (01:17):
I'm definitely more about words than about numbers, so I think when you're at school there's that suggestion that you're either kind of a creative person or a mathy sciencey person. And although I don't necessarily agree with that sort of division these days, I think I was always in the words in the creativity box. I was good at English, I was good at art, and I struggled through maths at GCSE and sort of got there in the end with a lot of support from my friends and the teacher. But definitely it's not the place I'm most comfortable. So for example, if I'm trying to work at a percentage, I have to every single time go, how do you calculate a percentage? Again, it's not something I've ever internalised that some other people just seem to be able to do. But in my last role before I became a content designer, I was an editor, a firm that created content for accountants.
(02:05):
So we were constantly dealing reports on the budget and reports on what was changing with VAT thresholds, and I had to get more comfortable with numbers and I never really actually got to enjoy the numbers, but what I got good at was coming up with techniques for checking my own working and making myself more confident in dealing with them and working with other people like you always do on the editorial team, making sure that there were people who were good at numbers who could check my calculations. But yeah, certainly doing that for several years helped me get over my fear a little bit. I would say.
Laura (02:34):
It's interesting you say that because for some reason I have met a lot of content designers who are number anxious or have dyscalculia or maths anxiety, and there's a joke between Jane and I. Jane McFadden helped me to create the designing for people with Dyscalculia poster, and the joke is really about how we wanted to get as far away from numbers as possible. We ended up actually in content in words, but ironically numbers come up all the time in content. So it's interesting that you found ways to make that comfortable for yourself and strategies for coping while trying to work on it sounds like quite heavily numerous services.
I had this discussion with somebody the other day, as a content designer, you actually work on a hell of a lot of things. One day you could be writing, maybe, text for some buttons the another day you could be working on a content within a table or some heavy financial information formatted in a really horrible way. And so sometimes for me, particularly if I'm not confident or I feel quite anxious sometimes working with certain types of content, it's really helpful to have people to lean on. And it sounds like you've kind of had a similar experience
Ray (03:59):
And I was just thinking as you were talking then, that there's something about content design as opposed to editorial. So editorial working with numbers in that context, it was always about deadlines and word count and I had to get better at working with numbers. If I got it wrong, we would've angry clients on the phone who were accountants saying, I can't believe you've put out a newsletter to all of my clients and you've got that threshold wrong. And it would literally be, we'd said 44 and above and it's actually from 44,000 and a penny, so you had to say all that kind of stuff because it was a pressured environment.
That's quite different to content design where on a previous project I was working on a thing around pharmacy opening times and it's quite complicated and the numbers are quite baffling in some ways trying to work all that out, but at least you've got that sense of space and a bit more of a supportive working environment where you are encouraged to take some time over it, bring it to a crit, get other people involved so it's not quite the same as “sort these numbers out, do it immediately and we need it by 3:00 pm” or whatever.
There's a bit more of a calmer, more collaborative vibe around content design, I think, which is great.
Laura (05:07):
Yeah, I agree. I think definitely content creates two eyes. Pair writing has definitely improved my experience of being a content designer or someone with dyscalculia and being a content designer as well.
Now. I've been following you a lot on LinkedIn and recently you've been talking about designing for people in poverty and on low incomes, and you've also shared a little bit about your own experience growing up in poverty, and I just wondered what the unique challenges, being an adult now who grew up in poverty
Ray (05:44):
So, this talk I've been delivering in a few different places in the last few months, I started out just doing it within BJSS, where I work, for a bunch of friendly colleagues where it was safe space and I got a really warm positive response to that which gave me the confidence to try and maybe take it out and do it for some teams in other organisations.
It's a really difficult talk to be because it's quite raw and personal and it's a combination of, it triggers lots of feelings I have about my own childhood and the experience of having lived in poverty and then also all this self doubt that people listen to you talk and think, “oh, you didn't have it bad compared to me”, or “you're over egging this or you're showing off”, which is a really weird one that not only did you grow up without any money, but also somehow by talking about it now you're trying to assert superiority somehow, which is quite strange in terms specifically of numbers I think and money, there's some really interesting stuff around how, as I keep saying, I've been financially comfortable for 20 years or so, but I'm still internally, I still feel like a poor kid and that manifests in really odd ways.
(06:49):
So, when the cost of living crisis started being in the news a couple of years ago, I had a real panic reaction to that, a real sort of in my gut meltdown over it. And my partner who's an accountant, which is convenient if you're not so great in numbers, she pretty much drew up a big spreadsheet and just said, look, if you get made redundant and if prices go up by this much and if this happens and that happens, we will still be fine.
(07:16):
We can cope up until this point. And I really needed to be talked through that. I somehow had access to the same numbers but could not look at them and logically say it's going to be fine. And I think that's just this internalised inside. I'm still a 9-year-old boy worrying that my dad's going to get made redundant and we won't be able to pay the rent or eat next week. It's quite a sort of visceral thing really. And I have some other odd financial habits. I don't have a credit card, which is quite unusual for an adult in a professional adult in the UK. I've had them in the past. I'm so anxious about getting into debt at all that I never used it. And eventually the bank just said, “well, if you're not going to use it, you're not allowed to have it” and took it back off me. And I know people say, oh, you should use it ,helps your credit rating and so on. I just can't get my head into the idea that I should use a credit card when I don't want to.
Laura (08:04):
Yeah, absolutely. The whole borrow money to get a better credit score blows my mind as well.
Ray (08:12):
Feels quite counterintuitive.
Laura (08:13):
It does, it does. And I have a very similar experience to you and as you were speaking then I was thinking about my experience with banks and managing money. I've been quite open about my experience trying to use a bank account, getting locked out of a bank account, getting labelled as fraud and then not being able to get a bank account with anyone else and therefore not having access to money, although it wasn't that long, but it was still long enough to be noticeable.
And now banking is a real sore point for me. It's a bit easier now with the banking applications and I think there's a lot gone into making that experience inclusive. But whenever I get an unexpected bill or if I check my account and there's something on there that I'm not sure of… because sometimes if you go to a shop and you spend some money, the name doesn't always match on your statement. And I have this really sort of deep fear of losing all my money. And I think it comes from, again, living through poverty,
(09:21):
The fact that you could just lose everything right then and there. Someone's going to take it from me. My money's not safe in a bank account. So when I see something on a statement that I'm not quite sure of, I kind of freeze. And nowadays you can lock your card online and I'm forever just locking it because I just panic and I have to know where I've spent this money, what this name is to feel comfortable. And it kind of became an obsession of mine to keep checking the amount of money I had in my bank account because the apps make that quite easy to do. You just pick up your phone, have a look. And so I have to really try and balance that within my life and not get so hung up on the numbers and I wonder if anyone else listening has a kind of similar experience of that fear of just one day having something the next day, not having anything.
Ray (10:19):
It's interesting that, because I know I've spoken to friends who have almost the opposite reaction to worrying about money, which is to never check their bank balance, which I used to find quite stressful. I would have friends at university who never looked at their bank balance and they would only know they'd run out of money when their card got rejected somewhere when they tried to buy something or they couldn't get cash out of the machine and they would rather just not know than worry about it. Whereas I like to be really all over it. I like to know how exactly how much I've got. And another of my weird habits is I like to just have a chunk of money in my account just in case something happens
(10:52):
And my partner's always saying “that could be in savings, it could be earning you some money.” And I'm like, yeah, but what if something happens? And I dunno what that something is, but it's just this. Yeah, that comfort blanket of a chunk of cash that I can use if I need to.
Something you said there about getting locked out of your account actually triggered a thought with me, which is that online websites rather than the apps really, when security got so intense because of the problem of fraud that they started asking you to use two or three different logins and number codes and they were often numbers or a password that had to have numbers in and punctuation, so they got impossible to remember. You had to write them down even if you were entering, if you'd written them down, which you weren't meant to do. It was putting the fourth character from the second part. Yeah, I mean actually really not inclusive, but that competition between that and security was obviously really like which comes first? Inclusion or security was we lost out.
Laura (11:47):
Yeah, I've been nodding along to what you said there. Yeah, I remember. So before the apps came about, it was online banking and there was three types of passcodes you needed to remember and I think two of them were sort of numbers and one was a word secure word or something and I just ring and then have to go through the whole, we need to check who you are type of situation almost every time. And that was flagged as suspicious, well, quite rightly so I suppose that's exactly the same behaviour as maybe someone a bad actor might have. But it's interesting, I had a chat with Jane and Rachel, so Jane McFadden and Rachel Edwards around trauma-informed design and numbers. And this is just a really clear example of someone like myself trying to get help and that looks like I'm doing something bad. And so I think that the access to services is a really sore area I think it sounds like for both of us. Now, when I was doing some research for this episode, I found that according to the financial conduct authority about 11 million people, 11 million UK adults have low financial resilience. And I just wanted to ask, what are some of the ways that perhaps people in poverty or earning a low income are vulnerable to deceptive patterns or these bad services?
Ray (13:20):
So I think I've talked about quite a bit recently is the shame that people carry with them about not having much money. And another thing I do, I use the word poor quite a lot and I know that's not a word people like these days and I reserve the right to use it because it's a word I've been using since I was small and it's a word that resonates for me. But people who are poor don't like to identify that way sometimes and they carry a lot of shame around it. And I certainly remember instances when my parents would start a process to buy something or to buy a service and then additional charges, hidden charges would emerge as they went through the process. And of course what a confident sharp elbowed middle class person will do is say, well, that's ridiculous, I'm out and walk away.
(14:03):
But because that would mean admitting they didn't have the money, my parents would just go along with it and we'd end up spending more on something than they'd intended to. And it was a trick, it was a deceptive pattern before digital, even in the real world of slightly slimy salespeople, they'd be tricked into spending more than they wanted to. And the knock on effect would be that they would then have to go home and say, right, well where do we borrow that money? What do we not buy? What do we cut from the weekly budget to cover that cost? And they would also feel humiliated and embarrassed that they've been tricked. So in all just a terrible experience. But I think that still goes on with hidden fees, with making people pay more for the privilege to use pay go as opposed to signing up for a contract and not being transparent about the cost upfront as well, you afford it, please give us a call for a quote or click through sign up, give us your email address to find out more about pricing. And I think any service that can just give you a price, even a ballpark figure upfront, is doing people a favour and being more inclusive. And I don't think even people that don't have a problem with numbers would probably be quite happy to have more pricing upfront I think.
Laura (15:11):
Absolutely. Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned that kind of embarrassment around or perhaps maybe not saying you can't afford it. So what I'm thinking of is, so I'm dycalculia and I have maths anxiety and low numeracy skills and I cannot spot mistakes very easily on bills receipts. And I'm often overcharged and I think it used to happen a lot. I remember in my twenties when I was at university going out for a drink, it's busy, there's a lot going on. And I remember walking away a lot with the receipt or in my mind thinking that doesn't sound that seem quite right, that money value for what I've come away with that, but I've always been scared of going back and saying, this doesn't look right just in case I've got it wrong. And it's not till sometimes the day after you look at your receipt or something and you feel like, oh, that doesn't, and I go, oh, I'm just going to ignore that. I'm just going to ignore that. And sometimes I'm with somebody and they'll go, oh no, you should tell them. I dunno, I kind of just stall and I'm like, I dunno what to do. It just feels really embarrassing to kind of stand up for yourself. I guess
Ray (16:27):
One of my little sidelines is writing about beer and pubs and so I spend quite a lot of time in pubs and certainly with the way the price of beer has gone over the last 15 years, there are definitely moments when you buy a pint and a half and the price they quote, you think, I'm sure that's for two pints. They've rung both of those through as two pints. And I've got much more confident I think as I get older and less anxious about things I've got better at just saying, sorry, how much is it for a pint? But it really takes a lot to overcome. I can almost hear that internal voice of my mom and my dad saying, don't embarrass yourself. They might think you can't afford it. And about half the time they just go, yes, it's seven pounds a pint. And I do feel a bit embarrassed that I didn't realise things had gone up. But yeah, there's something about lack of transparency there actually how often the price is not displayed or you're not shown the card machine when you swipe the card, they'll just literally hold it out to you and not give you a chance to see the price. Or in pubs and restaurants, it's not broken down properly. You don't see on the display one pint, six pounds, half a pint, three pounds 20 or something. So you just have to work it out on the fly. And we're not all good at that, are we?
Laura (17:34):
That's an excellent point. Yeah. I don't think I've ever seen… maybe in pubs where they have a special list or something, they might put the price, but yeah, you don't see often when you go into a bar or I guess with a restaurant there's a menu, but the menus don't always have prices and when they are displayed the price, we went somewhere the other day, me and my boyfriend, and it was like the name of the dish and then the number next to it, but no pound sign. So I thought it was like a list of each dish had a number associated and I'll have a number 12 please. But no, it was like 12 pounds and I couldn't get my head around. It didn't make any sense. And I think maybe it's an artistic design choice.
Laura (18:27):
So sometimes getting things like food and drink, everyone needs to eat and drink and the prices can be confusing to say the least, or just like you said, just not represented and you have to do mental maths and it is try and figure that out.
Ray (18:43):
And the safest thing to do is just not go at all, which is what I think people living in poverty often do is just opt out of experiences because the pricing isn't transparent or there's a risk that there'll be a 10% service charge they weren't told about or they'll be charged for the bread and butter, which they weren't expecting. They just say, safest thing is I'll just opt out these experiences, even if they could afford it, there's a risk of humiliation or not being able to quite afford it. So they miss out on a lot of life experiences.
Laura (19:11):
Something that I do often is round up to make it easier to understand.
(19:18):
So I generally love to tip. I'll always leave a tip if I can. And for me it's a little bit like it's a way for me to get around things, so I just round up and I just choose, I kind of try and calculate, okay, this meal is costing me 20 pounds. I'm going to maybe tip two pound or two or three pound or something, but I actually do five, so I'll pay 25 pound. And I think I'm comfortable with the number 25, so I just go, just call it 25. But sometimes it can be very expensive and people turn to me and they say, are you sure you want to tip that much? And I'm just like, yeah, because for some reason that number in my mind is easier to work out and I'm comfortable and it's a nice rounded number, so I'm kind of losing a lot of money by rounding up to get through the process of paying for things. It's interesting when you talk to people and these things come up and you realise not everyone's doing this and it's these, someone said to me that having dyscalculia or number anxiety, there are many extra steps involved and this is just one of a really great example of that many, those many extra steps I take to get around something as simple as paying for something. Do you think people make assumptions about poor people and people in poverty when using services?
Ray (20:44):
Well, yeah, they do. And I suppose the bigger problem in my mind that they don't think about them at all though. So I think one of the assumptions I've been writing about recently is the idea that when you talk about service being free, that the service itself is free, but then there are costs associated with accessing the service. And I think that ties into probably another assumption, which is that people who are not poor find it very hard to conceive of what being poor really means. So they'll say it's only two pounds, it's really cheap, it's only two not understanding that if you don't have any money, two might as well be 500 pounds and that two might have been what you were planning to use to pay for your electricity so that you could put the lights on this evening. So there are definitely some assumptions around what being poor actually means, what the lower threshold for how much money you might actually have in your pocket is, and then also just lack of understanding of where their service sits in the wider context.
(21:41):
I think, and this is a problem across all kinds of services that people tend to think of their service as the only service in the world, the only service that person will access today, and the only concern they have in their life is accessing that service. But actually the example I gave is that you might have a medical appointment which is free to access, which is great, but the only slot available is two in the afternoon or something. So to go to it, you have to take an afternoon off work, and it also happens to be at a specialist clinic in the next town over. So you have to get a into town bus, which costs eight, which is suddenly your weekly food budget has gone. And then because you miss a shift at work, you don't get a shift at work the next week you're not reliable. So suddenly this starts to mount up as quite an expensive free appointment. And I think that's probably the most useful thing people could do to address some of this stuff is just actually talk to real people, but also think about how their service fits into the wider ecosystem and the wider pattern of people's lives, which I'm not sure, and I think people in government are pretty good at it, but not perfect. It could do to happen more, I think.
Laura (22:44):
Yeah, there's a personal example of what you've just said. There is a family member had an appointment scheduled at their closest hospital and about, I think it was either on the day or the day before the appointment was moved to a different hospital, a private hospital, and it was in a place very unfamiliar to that person, and they actually didn't end up going because they felt very anxious about having to get there. And it wasn't somewhere they could get to easily on public transport. This person doesn't drive. And I understand that it's not something the NHS probably could have controlled or anyone had control over, but it did impact that individual and that individual didn't get the help that they needed because of that change, because they were so anxious about things like getting the bus, is the bus going to be on time? People will struggle to read information in a timetable.
(23:46):
And if you think about most buses and trains, they are always presented in a table format. It's very easy to choose the wrong time or the wrong if you're looking at a train, for example, I do this often. If I'm going to a train station, I get my finger and I trace the line between the destination and the platform number and the time because of how numbers look to me, it's very easy for me to choose the different platform. And I've done that many times. I've got on the wrong train. Yeah. So sadly, this individual, it's a very really good illustration of what you've just said. Something happened last minute, the cost of getting there, the anxiety around the travel meant that they didn't quite get there in the end, going back to what you said around, oh, it's only two pounds. I had an interaction with someone many years ago who assumed that because an individual had wifi, they were wealthy and rich, but what actually happened was this person had a mobile phone, but they didn't have a phone number, but they used wifi in public places. This individual was actually homeless and stayed in shelters, various shelters, and they accessed the internet and libraries, cafes or wherever the wifi was freely available. And it just illustrated how when we think about access to services, when we think people can get online, and we assume that that means that they're living in a comfortable house, they have wifi, they have a computer, when actually this person did not have a permanent place to live and used freely available wifi.
Ray (25:26):
There's something very interesting as well, that set of assumptions around access to data and electricity and devices that people make. And one of my colleagues, I remember talking a while ago about how the introduction of USB charging on buses had been a real breakthrough for some people because it meant they could get a bus ticket for whatever the cheapest round bus ticket was in their town and then ride around all day and charge their phone on the bus, and even buses that have wifi. But we've lost over the last few years, there's been, I suppose, an unfortunate crossover between the rise of digital services and the reduction in physical services in lots of towns. So there was a point when government departments and public sector bodies were very keen on saying, it's digital's cheaper for us to administer. It's more convenient for users, which is true in a lot of cases, and everyone has access to the internet, which is not true, but increasingly large numbers of people did. But there was always the backup and they can always go and do it at the local library. And of course as local libraries begin to close or they also have budget cuts to deal with, you start to lose some of that sort of backup. So yeah, it's on people to, as you've just described, find ways to manage their own internet access when they've got probably bigger problems to be dealing with. But if they don't do that, they can't access even basic services, which is pretty worrying state of affairs really.
Laura (26:45):
Yeah, agreed. And I've just remembered an article I read a few days ago around librarian and staff that work at libraries having to handle mental health crises. The libraries and other free public areas do have a heavy influx of people perhaps who have mental health problems. And there's been a rise in things like unfortunately abuse towards librarian staff, staff having to do or administer medical support as well. I think as service people and people who create services, we have to be aware of how our digital service impacts some of these free resources as in the libraries and the local health centres and places that people would go to get support for free. And so I think that's worth keeping in mind,
Ray (27:46):
And you're in danger of getting me on my soapbox here, but there's also a tendency to say, well, we can get rid of this service because this other service can take that on. And you see that in, for example, police forces, which are expected also to increasingly to handle welfare calls and dealing with people with mental health problems as community services. And that means of course, they don't have as much time to them respond to calls when someone says, someone's burgling my house. They only have the resource and the time they have. And I think there's a perception that there's lots of spare resource and time in organisations that can be used for these things. And in practise there probably isn't or not in a way that is actually useful for people. And the other thing is the assumption that the private sector can pick up the slack.
(28:29):
So for a long time when the conversation around council tax was councils have to make cuts, they're going to remove public toilets, it's the cheapest, easiest thing to remove, which is a whole separate accessibility issue that people can't leave their houses because they can't go more than 20 minutes without going to the toilet and there are no public toilets. But the response then was very much pubs, well, they can use pubs or local shops will let them use the toilet, which is fine up until those pubs and shops just either go out of business or decide that they don't want to pay a thousand pounds a year for toilet cleaning for people who aren't their customers, it's discretionary, and suddenly you end up with literally city centres with nowhere for anybody to go to the toilet, which is terrible. But that's a long way from numbers.
Laura (29:11):
Well, yeah, but it's a valid point. Yeah, I think I described it once as thinking about who you push the problem to.
(29:19):
And you can actually go quite far if you think about it, there was one said diagram I saw, and it's probably quite a popular one where in the middle you've got the user and then the circle on the outside is the environment, and then the circle on the outside is the world. And so when we think about services, sometimes it can be you looking through a lens of just for the user, but let's have a think about the environment the user is in and ultimately how that impacts everybody else. I think Airbnb is a really good example of this. So Airbnb, nothing against Airbnb or people who have Airbnbs, but what's happened now is that Airbnb are affecting the environment of all of these, especially tourist areas, bringing in more tourists and hiking up the house prices in those areas for the local people. So that's having effect on the environment, whereas I imagine at its inception, Airbnb was just about cheap accommodation and nice places. So we have to consider I think what impact our services have on the environment as well as the user.
Ray (30:30):
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and one of my colleagues talks quite often about the need to follow the unhappy path and how would you shut this service down if it didn't work out? And people don't like having that conversation. What's exciting is launching a service and setting something up and running a startup and talking about what do we do if this starts to have unintended consequences or doesn't work out, how will we shut it down? How will we fix it? And you do have to sort of indulge that, the miserable narrative, what if it goes wrong?
Laura (31:00):
Yeah. Is it called speculative design? It's coming to mind, is that right?
Ray (31:05):
Maybe I've heard that phrase. And also there's a more extreme version of it, a futures thinking, which I've got some colleagues who work on, which is where will we be in 10 years time? And that's really great fun and really challenges you to get outside immediate concerns, but that can sometimes one of the games you play, and that can be what might be a neutral outcome, what might be a positive outcome and what might be a negative outcome. And you can explore those, those three branching possibilities and that can really help focus your mind on, wow, if our startup is so successful that it takes over the world like Airbnb, how might that be a bad thing?
Laura (31:37):
Yeah. Did you ever watch Black Mirror?
Ray (31:40):
I couldn't bring myself to it. It looked too scary, which is weird because I love horror films and things.
Laura (31:46):
So you can apply, I think it's called a Black Mirror approach to services where you think about what is the worst thing, I guess it's just what you've just said.
Laura (31:57):
In 10 years, 20 years time, how would this really cool service we've created be used for wrongdoing for bad? And I guess that's for anyone who's not aware. Black Mirror is a series and it touches upon apocalyptic futures and technology used for bad things. And it's kind of an interesting thought process to go through, which is like, okay, what if somebody gets hold of this and uses AI in some nefarious way to re-engineer how we had it originally? So it's quite interesting.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the unhappy paths as well. I don't think any service in the world just has a happy path, so it's worth considering the pain points and things like that. How do you think organisations can practise financial inclusion? In the UK around 40 million people pay extra for things like in energy insurance and credit, and it's called the poverty premium.
(33:03):
And I found this stat from a charity called Fair by Design, and they're working hard to try and close the poverty premium and it centres on things like paying more for insurance because of where you live, because of your postcode only having access to paid for cash machines. So if your local shop has a cash machine and you have to pay for money and you don't have money, get a bus to go to another cash machine, then that's something an extra cost to you. So I think services should consider financial inclusion. Can you suggest some ways to help?
Ray (33:40):
Well, I suppose mean the thing that comes to my mind is just a mindset change. So I think a lot of private sector businesses or private sector organisations or businesses tend to think of things like deceptive patterns as a bit of a fun game. I think it's all part of the thrill of the chase, how do you, to put it bluntly, how do you get suckers and part 'em from their money? And I think as long as that mindset is there that that's all part of the skill of the sales person is to, and I've been involved tangentially in some of this stuff in the past where if you've got three price packages that statistically people will pick the one in the middle. So you have one ludicrously expensive package that no one will have one very cheap package, which hardly has any features in at all, and then one in the middle, that's the Goldilocks option, that's just right.
(34:25):
And that people will look at that, compare it to the expensive one, and think they're saving money and compare it to the lowest price one and think they're actually being quite savvy by investing a bit more to get all these extra features. But that's just totally manipulative and it is designed to trick people into spending more than they either want to or need to a lot of the time. So I think if you could change that mindset across the board and start focusing on how do we be as transparent as possible about the cost, how do you make sure we don't have hidden costs? How do we help people make the right choice for them? And I suppose the follow up to that is that mindset change probably will not happen without legislative or regulatory pressure. So it's been interesting to see in the world of banking that new regulation has come in which says that banks have to be really clear when people are looking at financial products about how much they will cost.
(35:15):
They're not allowed to present them using deceptive patterns which present the option that makes them more money. They have to present them to you in a way that is fair and clear so you can choose the option that is right for you. And I think we're going to see more of that cutting across various different industries. I think encouraging organisations by threatening them with fines essentially and censure to start putting the needs of users first, which unfortunately I don't think many of them will do off their own bats because unfortunately that's not how market economics work. I think they've got no incentive to do it otherwise.
Laura (35:48):
Yeah, so true. Something that really bugs me is paying less for something if you pay in advance. I'm thinking to myself here about direct debits or annual pricing strategies where the annual price is cheaper than if you pay monthly. Having grew up in poverty and not having a lot of money for a long time, I would always go for the pay monthly option. There was no way that I was going to pay upfront for anything, any subscription or anything like that. I needed to be able to cancel the money coming out. And so the whole idea behind saving money to pay in advance I think is a real privilege. And I see it all the time in all kinds of software. And I just think, well, what about the individual who's trying to get the job they want, who's trying to work their way out of poverty that doesn't have the $200 or however much to but front, but they might have the 1299 right now and that gets them access for a month. So that's something that I particularly wish organisations did less of for sure.
Ray (37:01):
Yeah, and that's a version of this thing that I always say it's all, well, I'm pretty sure it's George Orwell about how being poor makes you poorer because you can't afford to invest in things that last, so you buy. The story I think he tells is about someone buying 12 pairs of cheap shoes because they can't afford to buy one pair of good shoes that will last them three years. And that's certainly as I got older and more financially comfortable getting over that anxiety about spending a bit more money on something which will last or that I can get repaired. The other thing is that there's a premium on stuff you can get repaired that will therefore last you many years costs more. You need that initial outlay and people are excluded from it if they can't afford to. If they can't save up that money and find that lump sum, you're always encouraged to pay, as you say, buy cheaper options, whatever comes with the smaller increments of payments or to do the higher purchase thing where you end up spending three times as much on something. But because it's a series of smaller payments, you can manage it really. Yeah,
Laura (38:01):
Pretty terrible. Do you remember Brighthouse? So all of my furniture as a kid came from the bright houses of the world where I think it was like £1.50 a month. My mom was paying for the TV for forever. Thinking about the financial inclusion aspect and the number anxious or people with dyscalculia, those types of people, myself included, are often vulnerable to sort of deceptive patterns around pricing. And that is because it's very difficult to work out which is the best option. And so it's easier to choose the one being shown to me in nice presented way with a big red box around it or green boxing and a tick. And a lot of the times it is probably not so much now I work in UCD and UX, but definitely before I would just choose that option to save myself the stress and anxiety of trying to work it out. I would choose that option. And I know people in my family still do the same. And I always tell them, I'm like, please get in touch with me if you're going to do something, if you're going to buy something. Because I'm just trying to educate them slowly on how, like you said, the best option is the best for the organisation and not always for you. And so it saddens me because I've been in debt for a long time, thankfully no longer, but I was, and I didn't really understand what borrowing money meant.
I didn't understand APR and percentages and how much you pay back. And it was easy to just go on a website, fill in some bits of information, and there you go, I've got a thousand pound in my bank account. Oh, happy days. And not really understanding that I was actually paying back 5,000 pounds at the end of it. And so I think it's the conduct authority, consumer guidelines, I probably got that wrong that now banks have it are having to present the financial information in a way that's easy to understand. And I think it's hopefully they do that. We're kind of skirting the edges a little bit about financial information being a kind of human right now, I think it's a human, that information, especially financial information is presented in a way that's easy to understand for all of the reasons we've discussed. In my mind, I'm thinking about things like payslips, pensions, things that make you rich in the future. What do you think do accessible and financial information is a human right?
Ray (40:41):
Yeah. Well, it's something I think that probably most user-centered designers would love good design, good clear content to be a human right enshrined in law. Payslips a really interesting one. So we had a conversation at Spark a few months ago by one of my colleagues about how comfortable we were with numbers. And one thing that came up, almost everyone said that their payslip, no one understood their payslip. It was just like, that looks like about the right amount. That's what I feel like I should be taking home. And that made me think of my mum actually who left school when she was the earliest she could possibly leave school, but actually is pretty hot on numbers. And one thing she always would do was go over her payslip, however complicated it was really carefully. And if it was two pence out, she would go to the pay department and say, where's my 2p?
(41:27):
And they would say, it's only 2p. And she'd say, yes, but it's my 2p. And I think lots of us now don't do that. We have no idea whether we're being, we think we're being paid roughly the right amount. It'll do, and I dunno why payslips are even now as badly presented and complicated as they're partly it's the system. So the tax system is complicated. So once you start getting national insurance deductions and pension deductions and tax deductions, that all gets pretty complicated. But I would love to work on a project designing a payslip that makes sense to someone. That would be great, wouldn't it? To work on something like that where you can just look at your payslip and go, I get it. And it's probably too, with the information hierarchy, some of the footnotes need to be in a separate section and just like you need to see the key numbers at the top and why is this different to last month? That kind of thing would be really useful to know.
Laura (42:12):
Yeah. Well I'm so excited because I'm actually putting together a little working group on just this. So how to present accessible payslips. It's going to be with content designers, people with lived experience, and also accessibility specialists and people who know the law. So there's a law around what can go on a payslip and things like that. So yeah, I have a very similar experience. When I used to get payslips, remember they had the seal around them I would never open.
(42:43):
I have a stack of them from years ago and I just never looked because honestly, it would bring up so much anxiety and the numbers and the fact that they're in a table and the fact that there's words I don't recognise. And so yeah, I would just pray and hope that things were correct. And if they weren't, I would never speak up and I would never ask and I would just be like, oh, well this is just what happens. Sometimes my weird goes down and that's absurd, isn't it to think about now. So yeah, so I would love to have you a part of that if you're interested. And the idea is to make it free, make a template that's accessible and free for others to use.
Ray (43:23):
Sounds really cool. And I'd say definitely payslips was the thing in our discussion that came up as the number one practical example for most of us on a month to month basis. That was a moment when we realised how bad we were at numbers basically.
Laura (43:35):
And you're never taught so at school at all basically anywhere how to read this stuff. Same with pensions and investing, and you can learn a lot now from YouTube and if you have access to that, obviously. But yeah, it's not money, confidence, managing money and things like that. Everyone just assumes people know. And obviously as we're discussing, it's not always easy to speak up and ask for help.
Ray (44:02):
It's sort of another aspect of privilege I think, as well as if you grow up in a family where you see your parents talking about their investments and discussing their pensions and managing their money in proactive ways. And my parents manage their money in proactive ways, but not in that kind of quite sexy way. More and more in like, right, if we borrowed 10 pounds off my uncle on Thursday, we can cover the rent tomorrow, which means we can then pay him back when we get paid on. But just seeing that the idea that you would have money that you were investing to make more money and just having internalised that idea is a privilege that a lot of people don't realise they've got. I think.
Laura (44:38):
Absolutely. And a lot of my family members still deal in cash, so they will go to the bank on payday and they will withdraw as much as they can or everything and they will budget using cash. And this was another thing I forgot to mention was that you can't use cash anymore, it seems in a lot of places. And that in another episode I talk about how small our worlds have become because of digital technology. And it's to do with if you are only using cash because that makes you feel comfortable and you don't trust the big banks and you don't trust online services and you're going to get scammed and having that cash makes you feel comfortable and you can't use it in places and it limits what you can do. And of course, going back to the direct debit thing, a lot of the software and things you just can't pay for in cash. And then there's an incentive to use direct debit because it's cost effective. So if you're paying cash, you're more likely to pay more for things.
Ray (45:40):
Direct debits has come up recently in a conversation I was having about housing associations and how I've got one of these sort of stories of my childhood that I was, I called self-deprecating me, a tiny violin story, which I shouldn't do because it really wasn't very nice, but of hiding from the rent collector as a way of controlling your outgoings. If you could hide from the rent collector, you could skip paying rent a week and you would have some more money in your pocket that week. And I was talking to somebody who works on design for housing associations and he said that that's got much worse because you're paying by direct debit these days. So you literally don't have that control of your money. It can just disappear after your account and they can just go, oh, by the way, this month we're putting an extra charge on to cover the cost of replacing the gutter, by the way, which it terrifies me to the thought of this money just disappearing out of my can that I'm not in control of.
Laura (46:27):
Yeah, that was the money man. Right? The money man used to come round every month or every week. Was it, Every week?
Laura (46:34):
I think, yeah. Yeah. I used to live probably before my time, but I lived in council houses and social homes and it was a similar kind of vibe. Turn off your lights shut, the curtains don't go outside. Yeah. And that stays with you, right? That would stay with you for forever. So this is such a worthwhile conversation to have. I think you're a content designer, in fact, you're a content design lead, is that right?
Ray (47:01):
Yeah. Well, I'm design lead on my current project, so I'm managing a team of product designers and researchers, and I'm no longer actually doing the content design in the project. I passed beyond content design on that project, but I'm still a content designer in my heart.
Laura (47:16):
Wonderful. How can us as content designers or just designers generally consider people living in poverty, pool people, people on low incomes from the very start of a service or a design?
Ray (47:28):
So this is the question. I haven't been doing my talk the last few weeks and the challenge I keep getting is right. So what do we do about it? And it's quite difficult in practise, but I think the most important thing is to try to prioritise user research where you are actually in communities and spending time with people. And I'm not one of those people that bangs the drum for getting back in the office. I spend as much time as I can in this room here. But I do think when it comes to research, actually being out in communities and listening to people and overhearing their conversations, literally being in a community setting when someone talks about the difficulty they had, getting to that session tells you something about the challenges people face in their everyday lives. So I think there's something around that, especially if you're a designer who doesn't have that lived experience, let's be honest, lots of them.
(48:15):
So at least trying to get yourself into those kind of spaces and listen to people. And if you are a designer who has that lived experience, refreshing it because it's very easy to think, I know that my experience is out of date and that in lots of ways things have got more difficult and have got worse, and the challenges are different to the ones that I knew in my childhood. So yeah, spending time with people is really important. And then I think listening to the psychological stuff that we've been talking about here and that you talk about a lot on LinkedIn, how do people feel about numbers and about money and what can you do to reduce some of that anxiety and the fear they might feel? So I was just thinking, one example I think of really clever design is a couple of banking apps now.
(48:57):
Monzo has pots and one of the other has saving spaces. And in the app you can literally say like you were just talking about your relatives, they taking the money out and then budgeting with cash. It almost mimics or it's a metaphor for that to say, okay, that's my money for going out, that's my money for household improvements, that's my money for clothes. And I think it's almost silly that you would need to do that and yet psychologically really powerful. I think. So actually just acknowledging some of the psychological reality of how people feel and designing services that meet that rather than letting logic and the structure of might think about money and saying, actually maybe people who've experienced poverty think about it in a different way. How can we reflect that in the way the service is structured and designed? I think,
Laura (49:41):
Yeah, ironically, I've been getting some financial help recently and the person I spoke to said that all of the rich people do budgeting in the same way, but it's the access to information is the access to the services, it's access to investments and things like that, which is the biggest difference between financial inclusion between the rich and the poor, I guess. And the behaviours are actually similar. Budgeting, putting money aside for certain assets and things like that that happens with the wealthy and it happens in the poor kind of in a similar way. It's just that they're two worlds apart. I guess. I was talking to somebody who worked for a company and they pay participants, they pay them for the user research and they pay for their travel. I know we mentioned about getting places and things. I thought that was quite nice. We should always be paying our participants, by the way, if we can. I know that's not always easy, but we shouldn't rely on them for free. So Ray, where can people find out more about you and what you do?
Ray (50:50):
So probably the best place to go is to LinkedIn where I'm weirdly consistently active. I started using LinkedIn a few years ago for another job I had and got into the habit of posting almost every day. And that's where I mostly talk about content design, user centred design and so on. And also increasingly these days I find myself using Bluesky, which is one of the Twitter replacements where I don't talk about design as much, but I talk about other things. Yeah. And then also you can find lots of stuff I've written about user centred design and content design on the blog at Spark io. That's S-P-A-R-C-K io.
Laura (51:24):
Wonderful. Thank you. I really enjoyed your musings. I find actually that I probably reply to your LinkedIn posts the most out of everybody's that I really enjoy. I think you have an awful lot of interesting and valuable things to say and you deliver it in a way that's really easy to understand and interpret, which I think is not easy to do. So well done you, I'll pop links to your socials and all of the things you've mentioned in the description as well.
Ray (51:52):
So it's been really interesting to talk to you and thanks so much for having me on. I'm always quite excited to get to do podcasts and webinars and things, and people don't invite me on enough. So thank you so much for thinking of me. I really appreciate it.
Laura (52:03):
You're welcome. Thank you, Ray. If you think you might have Dyscalculia or maybe you've been recently diagnosed, you can find help and advice for children and adults on the Dyscalculia Network, search dyscalculia network, or visit dyscalculia network.com if you want to work with me and make the numbers in your service accessible. Visit Laura parker.design. Big thanks to Steve Folland for editing and producing this podcast.