Episode highlights
00:01:41 – About Danielle
00:03:19 – Danielle’s journey into FinTech as a UX researcher
00:05:15 – What is the GernderMag framework?
00:11:51 – Applying the GenderMag framework in FinTech
00:14:23 – GenderMag and gender biases
00:17:09 – How can applying GenderMag improve UX for everyone?
00:19:47 – Specifics of working in FinTech in Sweden
00:21:36 – Avoiding the wealth gap
About our guest
Danielle Jernberg is a Research Manager at Mastercard with nearly a decade of experience across digital product, UX, and user research. With a background in Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction, she has worked across fintech, finance, e-commerce, and consultancy, spanning leadership roles in digital product, technology commercialisation, and research.
Danielle specializes in turning complex qualitative and quantitative insights into clear strategic direction, partnering closely with product and design teams to champion evidence-based, human-centred decision-making at scale.
There are five dimensions of cognitive styles and problem-solving. Five dimensions of how we perceive and think about things that we are exposed to. These five facets are motivation, information processing, tinkering, self-efficacy, and risk aversion. Research found that these have a significant association with gender. 
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Danielle Jernberg: What research found is that it has a significant association with gender. But when we actually started to open up the Pandora’s box, then I started seeing other things. When people apply this method, it improves the experience for everyone.
[00:00:24] Tina Ličková: Welcome to UXR Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world and topics they’re passionate about. I’m your host, Tina, a researcher and a product manager, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, the UX research platform for recruiting, conducting, analyzing, and sharing insights all in one place.
This is UXR Geeks, and you are listening to a conversation I had with Danielle, who is a researcher in the FinTech space. She went into exploring the gender problematics in the finance field, which I find super interesting. An episode where it combines more perspective and gives very good clues on what to look for when researching and designing financial services.
We have our first suite in podcast, which I’m really happy about because we, I never go to connect with a Scandinavian researcher. So, Danielle, welcome, and if you could maybe start with our usual who you are, what do you usually tell us Everything about you.
[00:01:40] Danielle Jernberg: My name is Danielle, and at the moment I work at MasterCard and I sit at the Stockholm office, but I do work in Europe and even outside Europe as well.
As a teenager, I became quite interested in psychology, just like seeing different people having different perceptions of the same thing. So that fascinated me quite early on. So I did say when I was about 30 and that one day I will become a psychologist, but at the same time I was also very interested in digital things.
So everything. With the latest phone and the latest computer or latest tech. I also wanted to actually study how to create apps and so on. So I had those two interests quite early on. I actually started my own company when I was a bit older, so I didn’t study psychology. Yes. And I didn’t go into the digital world yet, but I did have an e-commerce for a few years and it really taught me like how to listen to customers and also translate that into the website, right?
And the e-commerce world. But things happen and I got. Kids, and then I decided that I have to do something proper, and that’s why I actually pursued my passion for psychology. So I did go to the UK and pursue my psychology degree during my last year. I was thinking like, how can I apply the psychology knowledge that I have?
Into something that is more like tangible and I just stumbled over a human computer interaction. So those combined my two passions, like psychology and research with the digital world. So that’s how I came into the research bit.
[00:03:12] Tina Ličková: And how was your way to finance? That’s also a very interesting field for a researcher.
[00:03:18] Danielle Jernberg: So after completing a master in human compute interaction, also in the uk, I started working at a consultancy and experience design agency. So that was like my role was UX research. As a consultant, you work on so many different projects with so many different companies, so that was like, I think my sorting point into finances.
But it wasn’t until I moved back to Sweden a few years later and started working in-house at Lunar where I really started to come into the financial world. Can you tell maybe a little bit more about Lunar, because I have the chance to see a presentation with Lunar and you guys were doing and it’s pretty interesting banking projects.
So could you maybe a little bit explicate on that one? I was working as a UX researcher and God, we was doing so many stuff. I think I’ve done absolutely everything at Lunar. So I’ve been involved with Eli. I’ve been involved in activation and onboarding in end-to-end projects where we were also looking at the different markets and we were also doing like a massive diary study into Swedes economists, and I think that’s one of my.
Most favorite projects because it was so interesting. So the question is rather, what didn’t I do at Lunar? Because I probably did everything. If we could explain a little bit more what is Lunar to people who don’t know it. Yeah, absolutely. So Lunar is a FinTech challengers in the Nordics, so you could compare it with Revolut or Monzo where it’s a digital, first up it has a banking license, so it works to like any other banking.
[00:04:52] Tina Ličková: You were mentioning the this big really study on the economy, and this is where I feel correct. Me if I’m wrong, where you also had the chance to look into the problematics. I will call it problematics, although it’s not problematic of gender in finance, and this is our topic. Could you maybe explore, just for the start, how did you end up doing this and why you was so interested?
[00:05:15] Danielle Jernberg: It was actually during my human computer interaction Masters. Where we had one of the lectures was actually part of the research team of the Gender Mag project, which we were very lucky to have her there. And we had a module called Inclusive Design, and we got to learn everything from like cultural differences to accessibility and so on.
One of the lessons were about the agenda mag framework, and at the time I was very like enthusiastic about it, but I didn’t really apply it until much later. So. Then going into like consultancy, working on a lot of the different projects, you don’t really notice things like gender differences or cultural differences because you’re jumping from one project to the other.
So it wasn’t until I actually started working in-house, when you’re sitting with the same flows over and over, the same design. When you actually started to see the differences. So that’s how I actually came into the gender mag because I started to see the differences between men and women when it came to activation and churn and all sorts of stuff.
And then I started to dig out the gender mag framework again and realizing how well aligned it was with something that I was taught a few years before. So that’s the way I actually came into the gender mag. Framework.
[00:06:36] Tina Ličková: This is where I’ll go a little bit back. What is gender framework, if you could explain that one.
[00:06:42] Danielle Jernberg: Yes, absolutely. So it is a very large skill projects that consist of a lot of studies that has been done. So a, the gender mag framework essentially is based on a lot of robust research, but it has resulted in three personas. The research when they were conducting it. Found that people are different on five dimensions.
So there are five dimensions of cognitive styles and problem solving. So cognitive styles is how we perceive and think about things that we are exposed to. So it hast to do with capability ability is just the way how we process. What we’re being exposed to, right? And these five facets or motivation, information, processing, tinkering, self-efficacy, and risk aversion.
So those five dimensions, what research found is that it has a significant association with gender. The research firm that, for instance, men tend to be more motivated to engage with technology because it’s fun, whereas female might just use it because it has a clear outcome for them. So we could see like a difference in that.
We can also see gender difference in risk aversion. Where filaments are less risky than males. And we can also see self-efficacy, which is about confidence. So how confident someone feels when they’re interacting with technology. And there we say that males have higher self-efficacy than filaments. And then we come to the tinkering dimension, and that is how likely you are to engage in like trial and error behavior.
Let’s say you open an app that you never used before and you just start clicking around. That’s like the tinkering part and what we see. Once again, males, they are more engaged in tinkering behavior than filaments. Um, information processing. That’s one of the other facets or the other dimensions, and that is how we process the information so we can see that filaments they need more like comprehensive.
Information to start engaging with something, whereas male are more like selective. So those are like the five dimensions that has been studied, which resulted in those three personas. So as you might guess, the three personas, one is like more extreme female, so very high on risk aversion, very high on let’s say comprehensive information processing.
And then you have a medium persona, which is like a mix of. Female and male behaviors. And then you have the third persona, which is like the extreme male behavior. So those are the three personas in the gender mag framework. Yeah. What I am really curious about, and you were mentioning it as you were working in house.
You were looking at the flows and at the research outcomes that you saw the differences. How did it actually apply? The first thing that I actually observed is when I was doing testing or observing research, and we were looking at onboarding in activation, is that. We were noticing that film tended to expect that, uh, should be given more information.
So that was something quite interesting because we keep hearing, oh, I stopped using Lunar because I wasn’t given. Enough information to understand what Lunar was, or I stopped using Lunar because I didn’t get the information required for me to continue with it. So I never really learned what it was, or it took me like a year to really understand Lunar.
And you never heard those, for instance, with Mills, because they were more like, I just downloaded it. I thought it was fun, like it was an innovative. Bank app and it just started clicking around. And especially when you’re working with like apps, they don’t have a lot of space, right? So some of the features almost required tinkering.
And I think that is one of the, I don’t wanna say problems, but one of the things that those who work with mobile apps need to think about the fact that film doesn’t tinker. They won’t find features that require tinkering. So. Those were the things that I started observing and which led me into the gender model.
But when we actually started to open up the Pandora’s books, right then, I started seeing other things. And for instance, just looking at crypto and investment, men are three times more likely to invest in crypto, which I found very interesting. And I’m not that surprised because talking with Ments about it, they were also saying it’s a bit scary and it’s.
A bit new and it’s a bit risky, but just having those Delta show me that that was backed up internal as well.
[00:11:33] Tina Ličková: What I’m also curious about is that goal setting is more common about women, which was surprising to me because I come from a different cultural background and it made sense. Doesn’t make sense. I’m very much torn apart. So could you tell more about that one?
[00:11:51] Danielle Jernberg: So this was also. Extremely interesting because of course I could hear it in the qualitative interviews that I was observing or conducting that we intended to use the goal filter at Learner. So the goal filter at Learner is essentially like a pocket that you can open and you can put money away for different goals and you can also see like how close you are to actually achieving that goal.
That was like a big favorite with women that we were, uh, interviewing. But actually looking at the data, me mills were converting better on all the things throughout Lunar except the goal feature. So here women were really like Overperforming, so they had statistically more number of goals and also use using the goal feature significantly more.
And looking at the gender mag research, we can also. Said in motivation that dimension rights, that women are more outcome driven when they use something it needs to satisfy, let’s say, an outcome or a goal that they’re looking for. And I think that is something that was mirrored in the research I was doing as well.
[00:13:01] Tina Ličková: We will be right back after a short break with a commercial message from our sponsors. Hey, UXR Geeks, you know this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak. I’ve tried several UX research tools before, and most item make recruitment a nightmare or overcomplicate The analysis. UXtweak is the first one that actually does both.
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And this is what I wanna address in this episode as well, is the problematics of gender. And you were saying you have three personas. I myself, I’m mixing what they call maybe male energy in few instances, but I feel very womanly. Most of the things, how did you approach this binary, non-binary topic in the app and in the product itself?
[00:14:23] Danielle Jernberg: When I think about applying gender mag, I don’t think about improving it for females or males. So I don’t think about it binary because what I also see in research is that people are very different on this dimension. It doesn’t really have to do with gender. So my father, for instance, it has more of the female interaction behavior, right?
My mother needs to help him. With his phone app, so I don’t want to think about it as like s all of them, they are risk averse or all males just want to download an app because it’s fun. Actually, what I’m trying to do is to use the method to make the experience better for everyone. So everyone that might be on different positions on this dimensions, right?
And what we actually see in academic research, Tona, is the fact that when people apply this method, it improves the experience for everyone. It’s not just female are benefiting from it. It’s actually both genders and everyone is benefiting from it. So I don’t want to think about it in like binary terms, if that makes sense.
[00:15:33] Tina Ličková: It definitely makes sense. One of the things that I was fighting myself and we were discussing endlessly, for example, when I was working on a financial act, was that we had proven articles on studies that the. Narrative is changing amongst young women. I was working in Germany and that investments, they’re more open about it.
They do care more about financial future and they take more responsibility for themselves. What we saw face to face in research or in surveys was that it wasn’t a storying and, and we were like thinking about, okay, how do we actually address women. Females or people identifying and socializing as women because that’s different component that we need to add to it who just don’t feel the empowerment to take care of their finances or go into more risky stuff like investments.
And then we were thinking about an educational campaign or stories in the end. Which was like, oh, wait a minute. But if we start educating women, we are basically applying of, oh, you don’t know about it, so you should learn, girl. And I was like, okay. That’s also the point. So it’s very complicated and that’s why I was asking about binary, non-binary, how it helps.
Do you maybe have an example of. Improving a thing for women or females and then helping everybody with it within the app.
[00:17:09] Danielle Jernberg: This is something very important. So what we tend to say, especially with this game like FinTech challengers, is that the are very minimalistic. So they strip down the interferences because it’s going to look tidy.
But actually in this case, less isn’t more because as we can see some. People, they need more information and they need more guidance. And that is something that the gender ma can really help you understand. So just by putting those personas, you can review the flows that you are designing to make sure it has like the right balance.
So it’s actually facilitating, uh, the mill. Behavior or the interaction behavior and the film. So as an example, I’m thinking about like the flows that we were reviewing when we did like the onboarding and activation. We were seeing that film Mills, we were losing them at the beginning and they didn’t really understand the learner app.
Something that we were working on was to be able to send out as a first mini step, a guide just at the beginning to give them that comprehensive information. So they don’t feel that they’re just being shoved into the app and then they have to like tinker around. So that was like one example that was working quite well.
But I think it’s not only about the design team. I think this is something that is a collaboration across everyone at the company. So it’s even like the marketing and pillar, like how do we actually communicate with. Everyone. So it’s appealing for everyone and how do we design it? So it’s appealing for everyone and everyone understands it.
Even the data team, like how do we put in gender there as one of the data points to understand where we might find differences?
[00:18:54] Tina Ličková: As you were mentioning the study on Swedish economy or the financial literacy. If I understand it, I am just really curious, and I know it’s a little bit off topic, but I have to ask because when I was working in Germany, it’s one of the nations using the most cash in the world.
Like they love the ATMs, they love their cash. It’s historically going back into. Even the first World War, which is really interesting, and Sweden is on the other side, all cashless society, and now I think it’s 2% of people are using cash right now, which is probably the more the, uh, older generation. What are the things that you saw talking to people and talking to females, how it’s changing in the society?
Could you maybe tell us more about that? And I’m so curious.
[00:19:46] Danielle Jernberg: Uh, you are completely right, like we are seeing if you’re comparing just like the Nordic countries, Sweden is way ahead when it comes to being very financial savvy and quite high of financial literacy. So almost everyone, even like um, down 60 years old, they have started investing.
So it is quite scary when you do research with It’s Yeah, and they have so many different apps and it’s startup. And the use of this banking and that banking act, tracking their expenses. So it’s quite exciting. And environment being,
[00:20:19] Tina Ličková: and how is it female because I’m also a little bit like addressing Swedish politics in IT and Swedish feminist movement and how Sweden is as a state supporting solitary parents or even women.
The system is very social. So did you see anything there that might be of interest?
[00:20:40] Danielle Jernberg: So one thing that I noticed is Avan, so I dunno if you’ve heard about them before, but they’re very big in Sweden. It’s an investment platform and they have been very big in actually supporting women to get into investment, and I think that is very unique.
I know as well at Lunar. We had film influencers within investments that were out and talking to conferences. And so there’s a lot of support in Sweden in general for investing quite young, but also for fulfillments to get into investments. So I think it’s a very positive, uh, film environment in that sense.
[00:21:20] Tina Ličková: Yeah. Yeah. And then also comparing it with the whole world really makes a difference. Danielle, is there anything that I. I didn’t ask you about. And you feel like that this is still a topic that we should be talking about?
[00:21:36] Danielle Jernberg: Man, I think there’s a lot to uncover here. Something that I’ve been thinking about, something that I realized when I was seeing the differences is that we are seeing that there are more mills that are using FinTech ups and or investing in crypto, et cetera, and I think there’s a risk that we are getting like wealth gap.
So if we don’t start realizing that we need to design for everyone, we might risk that there is a gap farther down the road. And it’s also about all of these amazing features that FinTech apps actually have if we don’t design them inclusively. With all the interaction styles, there is a big chunk of the population that might be missing out.
This is what I wanna stress out here, that with the research work and incorporating people out of the human man and dominant customers. We are actually doing the social responsibility not as a CSR kind of thing. You put it on, on what kind of flag that comes to your mind, but it’s really starting from the beginning.
Although we are looking into these people, how they could use and even pay for our services so they, it’s usable for them. With that comes a question in my mind because we have a lot of researchers around who are listening to us from around the world. Working or being somehow important in insight. Is there something that you would like to say to people who are working on FinTech, um, that should be taken care of or?
We start doing, I’ll stop doing it. I think everything that has to do with innovation and something new, keep in mind that big chunk of the population will actually be quite risk averse and need more information, more comprehensive information. So when you are designing something that is a bit innovative.
Like FinTech, something that can be a bit scary. Keep that in mind that you’re not cutting out too much information. So when it comes to like features, be aware that there is a lot of people who are not doing tinkering. So make sure that. Features or anything that is of benefit is highlighted properly and doesn’t require tinkering.
But I think as like a final thing, I really encourage everyone to go and look at agenda Mac personas because they are super helpful and it’s a really quick well of actually shaking your flows because you can just download those three personas and put them up in Figma and start looking, okay with my flow here or my design.
Have I thought about? All these different like interaction styles or all the dimensions because all the research that is being done everywhere across the world is actually showing that it’s making an impact.
[00:24:26] Tina Ličková: Thank you. It was a great conversation. I know we went just really about the survey, but I think it’s a great inspiration to actually start looking into it.
To anybody out there if you are looking into genders and new product, not just FinTech, but in general Mag, you go to framework. Thank you very much for sharing it with us.
[00:24:48] Danielle Jernberg: I think I need to credit Margaret Burnett and Simon for the gender mag as well. So Simon was one of my lecturers. Yeah, so thank you so much for an awesome framework.
[00:25:00] Tina Ličková: Thank you.
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