Forum Restructure & Feedback šŸ”

Hey all,

I just landed in Los Angeles, where Iā€™ll be spending some time in Hollywood shooting my first feature-length film project with a production company. Itā€™s nice and sunny here :sun_with_face:

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Got a few days of work to finish up first though before I head off for a few weeks and the first is a forum restructure which you might have just noticed. I wrote a proposal last week, discussed it with the team and the Coral Crew, and wanted to give you a quick heads up on whatā€™s changed and some other things to bear in mind.

So, our old structure had 17 top level categories and only 5 sub-categories. This looked messy, and meant a lot of scrolling if you werenā€™t using a large high-res display to get through all the categories. Some top level categories were popular and some werenā€™t, so there it felt a bit inconsistent.

Our new structure has just 10 top level categories, 2 of which are only visible to staff and/or Coral Crew, so 8 top level and 9 subcategories that are publicly viewable.

Whatā€™s changed:

  • Crowdfunding & Investors has moved from being top-level to a sub-category of Monzo Chat.
  • News & Updates where our official blog posts are stored, is now a sub-category of Monzo Chat. This category wasnā€™t open to posts by non-staff, so didnā€™t make sense as top-level.
  • Monzo Labs is now a sub-category of Making Monzo. We realise Labs in itself has been a bit unclear of how it works historically. The logical flow moving forward is that we will tease what weā€™re working on as part of Making Monzo. If itā€™s something that requires public testing/feedback or early access, itā€™ll graduate from there to Labs, and if it doesnā€™t, itā€™ll go straight to the app. Therefore it makes sense for Labs to be a sub of Making Monzo.
  • Business Banking is a now a sub-category of Monzo Chat
  • Fintech Chat is now a sub-category of Financial Chat.
  • Coral Crew & Staff categories have been deleted. Most of you wonā€™t have seen this categories, as the name implies they were for the benefit of the CC and Staff respectively. They werenā€™t getting used much, and as one of the ā€œPerksā€ of Coral Crew is now that they have their own single-channel access to the main Monzo Slack, it wasnā€™t needed for them to communicate in a shared environment with staff.

If you have any feedback, please let me know. Does the order of the categories make sense as it is, or would that benefit from a shuffle? And, do we need any more categories or sub categories? Nothing springs to mind for me personally, so please let me know if you feel otherwise.

A quick note on Feedback & Ideas

As some of you may have noticed, we recently turned on User Voting for the Feedback & Ideas category. We are very happy with the initial results of this, and weā€™re encouraging synchronisation (and sending of traffic) to the category via our social media channels.

What that means is weā€™ll be sending tweets like this in response to user suggestions, and if the suggestion has already been made weā€™ll be directing them to vote for the existing topic. I already fed back the Top 10 most voted threads so far to our Product teams, and they were happy for the feedback. Weā€™ll be doing that every few weeks.

Quick clarifier - just because something is a popular request does not mean in and of itself that we will be building it. But it definitely provides a data point and useful context, and can potentially aid with prioritisation.

Let me know your thoughts!

12 Likes

Looks like a very sensible reorganisation.

My one bit of feedback would be I think there should be a ā€œBusiness Bankingā€ subcategory in the ā€œFeedback & Ideasā€ top level category.

In the current, I think itā€™s not clear if feedback and/or ideas only related to business banking should be put in the ā€œBusiness Bankingā€ section or the ā€œFeedback & Ideasā€ section. Having a subcategory for business banking in ā€œFeedback & Ideasā€ would also allow any squads working on business banking to get a quick overview of the communities feedback and ideas.

4 Likes

Didnā€™t even notice it because I always view all categories by latest. :wink:

6 Likes

Same here lol

PS I did see this and wondered what it was:
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That was the welcome post for a forum thatā€™s now been deleted. So we had to move the existing posts into a new archive. Not sure why that one became publicly viewable :man_shrugging:

New structure makes sense, I like it :+1:

The one thing Iā€™ve noticed quite a lot of recently, is new members creating topics for features/feedback/questions when a quick search will reveal they already exist.

Do you think re-categorising things will help them or can more be done?

2 Likes

I think weā€™ve all missed something here:

@simonb, what ya filming?! :film_projector:

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Loving the new restructure, makes things more streamlined and should assist the community to search for post

1 Like

Great work @simonb, looks great!

1 Like