Bringing the Community Into the app!

Hi all,

I thought now would be a good time for me to share something I’ve been working over the last couple of weeks :smiley:

We’ve been trying to figure out a way to combine some the highlights of the Monzo community and how to bring them to wider community via the app.

Three themes which stood out to me as universally relevant and interesting were -

Product Updates
Sneak Peeks
Community Ideas and Feedback

and these are the areas we’ve focused on for the first version of the community in app feature.

You can check out our early community in app webviews, which we pushed out to < 3000 users as a test here

This is a very (very) early version of how the feature will look, accessible via the Help screen and a monthly feed item update (which you can opt out of!)

15

42

The feature is webview based - initially we will build on the Roadmap API to create a place for us to share what we’re working on, sneak peeks of exciting things coming up and ideas we’d love to explore at some point in the future.

You’ll be able to up vote these ‘cards’ and click to view more information and a link to the related discussion thread on the community forum.

To get a feel for how this will work - you can check out a rough mock up of the roadmap here (note, we’ll be customising using our own CSS so it fits with the app seamlessly)

We’re currently building V1 - looking further ahead, we’re hoping to introduce a place for people to give more open ended feedback and ideas and also a polling tool to bring big decisions to the wider community in the most democratic way possible.

Really excited to share the more details as we progress - please feel free to leave any comments and feedback below :+1:

38 Likes

I much prefer the forum through a browser due to screen size - this new method would be ideal if I were running :monzo: on my iPad :slight_smile:

5 Likes

This looks really interesting. Buzzing to see this develops

1 Like

Oooh awesome. I guess working with Stripe will be useful for helping with sending ‘your new card details to Netflix and Github so you won’t miss any subscription payments’. Reckon you could get PayPal and Amazon added to that list? :smiley:

1 Like

This looks great! :+1:
I’m very much looking forward to seeing this implemented.

1 Like

I like the direction one is taking :+1:

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.

Hi all,

Just wanted to share a quick update of where we’re at with this project :smile:

A few of you may have noticed a feed item titled ‘Under Construction’ (we thought it sounded a bit jazzier than community-in-app :wink:) with a link to our in app roadmap with updates on cool stuff we’re working on. We’ve sent 2,000 of these to iOS users since Wednesday.

Along with screenshots, each card has a short description of the feature and a link to a relevant community forum where they can give their thoughts and feedback.

The feed seemed like the best temporary home for this content, whilst we test if it’s something people would find useful. In addition to the numbers behind the clicks, I’ll also be contacting some recipients of the feed item next week to follow up.

Below is a demo video of the feature, containing some roughly drafted content. For anyone who hasn’t received the feed item, but is interested, check it out and post your thoughts questions in this thread! It’s likely some of you may receive the feed item next week too as testing continues.

Thanks!

5 Likes

Looks great now it’s been styled with the Monzo colour scheme @Naji :raised_hands:t3:

1 Like

Looks really good! Well done team!

It’s be cool to have the community forum accessible in the app too one day… I currently have a link that works well though…
Screenshot_20180224-000159

1 Like

There’s some performance issues with the feed item, it loads ‘jerkily’, tapping the preview itself causes the screen to flicker, without opening the community post & it’s slow to open the posts when you tap a button.

The plus button overlay suggests to me that tapping it would enable the user to zoom in on the preview (which would be quite helpful, although pinch to zoom would be even better) but tapping it doesn’t do anything at the moment. If it’s not going to become a button for anything, it would be better if it wasn’t displayed on the bottom level preview.

Maybe it’s just me but I automatically tap the ‘back’ button in the top left hand corner of the screen for navigation, rather than the ‘go back’ button on each page, which takes me back to the feed & means I have to tap back into the feed item again.

Aside from that, this looks great & I’m a big fan of the idea :heart_eyes: it’d be cool if there was a more permanent, easier to find, place in the app where I could go to check on these updates..

2 Likes

Thanks for the feedback all!

Depending how people interact with this feed item - we may scope out a way to bring the forum experience closer to the app. Something like single sign on would be :heart_eyes:but not possible for security reasons. The good things is, we can track exactly how deep people dig into the content in Under Construction, with the forum being the most detailed and up to date source of truth - so if it looks like people are using these links a lot, then we have a strong case to look at how we make it easier to get involved on the forum via the app or at least an app (maybe there’s room for a separate dedicated community app??)

By preview do you mean the images you see on the main Under Construction Roadmap? Or are you referring to what happens once you click the link to the forum from a ‘card’?

So the blue pluses should take you the the ‘card’ for that feature - we felt it was important to make sure that users know that the images are clickable. Inside the ‘card’ we could probably actually get rid of the plus!

Also, I agree pinch to zoom would be really good to have :slightly_smiling_face:I’ll look into it.

Me too! We’ll tweak this if possible- we’re working with webframes using the Roadmap API so there are some limits when it comes to styling.

If this is the general consensus (people enjoy the content but would prefer to see it else where) then we have some clear next steps for this project!

3 Likes

Yes.

They do.

:+1: