Forum Restructure & Feedback šŸ”

Hey all,

I just landed in Los Angeles, where I’ll be spending some time in Hollywood shooting my first feature-length film project with a production company. It’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 what’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 weren’t using a large high-res display to get through all the categories. Some top level categories were popular and some weren’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.

What’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 wasn’t open to posts by non-staff, so didn’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 we’re working on as part of Making Monzo. If it’s something that requires public testing/feedback or early access, it’ll graduate from there to Labs, and if it doesn’t, it’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 won’t have seen this categories, as the name implies they were for the benefit of the CC and Staff respectively. They weren’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 wasn’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 we’re encouraging synchronisation (and sending of traffic) to the category via our social media channels.

What that means is we’ll be sending tweets like this in response to user suggestions, and if the suggestion has already been made we’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. We’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 it’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

Didn’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 that’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 I’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 we’ve all missed something here:

@simonb, what ya filming?! :film_projector:

2 Likes

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