Shumka x Alaphia: Sereniful

Shumka x Alaphia: Sereniful is an industry research project led by Manuhuia Barcham and Cemre Demiralp in collaboration with Alaphia Financial Wellness, that explores how emotion-aware interface design, serious game mechanics, and data interaction can address the “knowledge-behaviour gap” in financial wellbeing.

This project brings together faculty, students, and industry partners to co-develop and conduct user testing on Sereniful, a next-generation financial wellness application designed to help users build healthier emotional and behavioural relationships with money. Between January to May 2026, student research assistants (RAs) will work in phased production sprints, moving from research and ideation through to low and high-fidelity prototyping, usability testing, and iterative refinement, reflecting both emotional wellbeing goals and practical data-interaction requirements.

This collaboration aims to contribute new applied knowledge to the fields of design for wellbeing and digital financial literacy and will generate new insights into the role of design in mitigating financial stress and contribute transferable methods and design patterns relevant to other wellness, productivity, and emotion-driven digital experiences. This project will produce front-end prototypes, visual and interaction design assets, and documented design methods that advance understanding of how interface design, data visualization, and gamification can reduce financial anxiety and increase adherence in wellness-focused technologies.

Project Objectives

  • Produce accessible, high-fidelity front-end prototypes that integrate financial data interaction, emotion and needs mapping, gratitude practices;
  • Test engagement mechanisms that sustain usage without manipulation;
  • Establish design patterns that reduce anxiety and financial avoidance;
  • Support knowledge exchange between academia and industry while giving students applied experience in UX research, interactive data visualization, and serious game design.

Project Team

Manuhuia Barcham – Faculty Lead, Emily Carr University
Cemre Demiralp – Co-Lead, Emily Carr University
Nadia Beyzaei – Sessional Faculty, Emily Carr University
Grishma Shah – Research Assistant, Emily Carr University
Selina Kang – Research Assistant, Emily Carr University
Priyanka Poulose – Project Coordinator, Emily Carr University
Natasha Knox – CEO & Domain Expert, Alaphia Financial Wellness
Sebastian Beltran – Concept Artist, Alaphia Financial Wellness
Victor Diaz – Engineer / Front-end Programmer, Alaphia Financial Wellness

Project Partner

Alaphia Financial Wellness is a Vancouver-based planning practice that combines therapeutic interventions with financial planning to address the emotional and behavioural barriers that prevent clients from acting in their own best interests—the gap between understanding what to do and actually doing it.

Sereniful is a serious game by Alaphia that has evolved from two decades of direct client work to make emotional and financial well-being accessible at scale. Led by Natasha Knox (CFP®, TEP, and IFS practitioner), the project draws on her years of experience to build what other financial wellness apps miss: understanding what is so hard about doing what we know is good for us.

Sereniful addresses the consistent patterns that derail financial well-being: emotionally driven decision-making, overwhelm, financial avoidance, financial disorganization, and paralysis caused by fear and anxiety. The platform harnesses the power of technology to provide the immediacy of feedback that one-on-one service cannot deliver. In an in-game world, users build emotional self-awareness, work through financial scenarios anonymously, test decisions, figure out the next steps for correcting financial missteps early on, while being rewarded for consistent engagement.

This project is generously supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Mobilize Grant. 

Program News

No results found.