Help Revamp

Sneak Peeks: not just for Designers any more :wink:

I’m an iOS Developer here at Monzo, and recently I’ve been working on upgrading our ageing Help tab. Admittedly I did have some design help with this one…


Help has been a bit limited up until now, which isn’t particularly helpful for anyone. We’ve been working on a bit of a revamp which should make it much more useful, as well as giving ourselves the tools to keep improving Help over time so that it keeps getting better.

We’ve broken things out into sensible sections, which pull content from our server (so we can iterate it quickly without releasing an app update). The main area shows Trending issues (so we can alert you to specific things that aren’t working right now).

In future this could be driven by machine learning to make answers super-relevant to you. For instance, if we see that you’re travelling abroad and had a problem, we could link to travel info from the forum here, as well as info on FX rates and limits :airplane:

Of course, immediate access to Chat is always still right there on the main page, as well as every page throughout the flow. We’ve also integrated our recent transaction help flow here, which offers transaction-specific help, like “Why was this transaction delayed” for TfL, or “What the heck is this?” for Amazon Prime subscriptions :money_with_wings:

Next up will be integrating actions into Help – it’s all very well for us to say “You can get a PIN reminder” or “You can replace your card”, but much better for us to say “Press this button and we’ll sort that for you” right there in Help!


One more thing…

Talking of forum travel tips, there’s some seriously useful info here thanks to the amazing community :heart: So we went ahead and integrated that into the Welcome feed items that you see when you visit somewhere new.

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One more thing… :joy:

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That’s looking really good, thanks for sharing, @james. One thing to consider (and this goes for the app generally) is graceful degradation when offline. I think pulling content from your servers makes a lot of sense. But maybe there’s a core set of help topics that are useful even if offline, that could be stored on the device (even if they are originally pulled from the server and periodically updated when online).

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This is a great shout. Right now offline drops back to just Community and Live Chat links. We could definitely be caching Help content!

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Thanks for sneaky peaks :slight_smile:

Two bits of feedback:

  1. Please test the Help section (and entire app) with Dynamic Text. I’m partially sighted and have the size increased quite a bit. To enable go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Larger Text, enable Larger Accessibility Sizes and slide the slider a few notches to the right. I have mine set to four from the right side, which causes some labels in your current help section to be cut off fairly unusably, whilst the rest don’t reflect the larger text size.

  2. Please avoid using yellow text on a white background. It’s incredibly difficult for people with poor eyesight to read. The blue text in the Help section is also rather low contrast.

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Thanks so much for this feedback Tom! We’re looking at it right now to find a solution :blush:

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Having updated to the latest iOS app today, I had a look at the new Help section. Looks really good, huge improvement, and it’s quick (it’s annoying in apps when you need help and have to spend time watching a spinner). One usability issue, though, regards URLs – they are not live, and the text isn’t selectable. So in this:

I can’t actually get to the MasterCard page specified. Ideally this would be a live link, and load an in-app Safari view when tapped.

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Or whatever our default browser is. On my iPhone I prefer using another browser instead of Safari due to the regular issues with compatibility when trying to access websites

I’d prefer not to be kicked out of the Monzo app just for following the link in Help, so I’d prefer the in-app web view (where you can click ‘Done’ when finished and have the web view slide away so you’re back in Monzo). As far as I’m aware, Safari is the only option for this on iOS.

[As an aside, I’ve not had any comparability issues with Safari on iOS; and certainly not with Monzo or MasterCard’s websites.]

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I have found issues with idnow.eu (when using their video verification thru the browser), logging in to various foreign banks, etc, when their sites optimized and tested for use with Crome or Firefox.

Sorry, another usability issue I just noticed. The option to go into in-app chat is now labelled, “I still need help”. I understand why, but it makes it confusing when you receive a response to a request. I just did, and when I went into help, I had to scroll down, and then I saw:

I still need help (1)

It’s not obvious that this is how you get back into an existing chat/support issue. I don’t know if it’s possible that when you have an ongoing support issue, there is an option near the top called “Continue my chat with the support team”, or something similar?

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Fair enough. I’ve got a pretty low tolerance for switching browsers because of poor coding on websites. I don’t expect everyone to prefer using Safari, but I also don’t expect to have to switch browsers to use the web. Especially as Safari’s not an obscure rendering engine with few users. I tend to look elsewhere if there are major issues (though, as I said, this has not been an issue for me for years).

Edit: I should clarify, that this isn’t Safari/Apple-specific. I feel the same about other browsers. Companies should be writing website that work with standards-compliant browsers. It’s not on expecting users to switch browsers (which people choose for features other than rendering) due to poor coding. [/Edit]

In any case, I think that for the purposes of in-app Help links, it’s best to stick with staying in the Monzo app, as it seems unlikely that any of these links would lead to sites that cause trouble with Safari or whatever would come up in the equivalent embedded browser view on Android.

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:100:

You’ll be pleased to know this is well under way :slight_smile:

Since this is Sneak Peeks, here’s a quick look at what I’m working on right now:

Expect lots of rich actions and deep links throughout Help for our next iteration (should be 1.9.9), as well as supporting future work for the new Transactions screen design :thumbsup:

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When 1.9.9 drops, will all users have access to the new help section?

That’s the plan – with the obvious caveat that the A/B testing has to show that it solves customers’ problems and doesn’t harm their Monzo experience :slight_smile:

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Looks like there are some really nice changes coming to Dynamic Type in iOS 11: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/245/

It would be good to have link detection in the app as i could see some refernces to some links and I couldn’t tap them nor copy them.

It would be good if i was able to tap the link and get faster to the solution of my problem without having to contact the support team.

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Great point, this was also raised earlier in the topic so I’ve moved your post here :raised_hands: looks like that team are working on a fix & some enhancements :tada:

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I don’t know if the Intercom SDK would allow this but would you be able to display the last 3 customer service chats directly in the help tab? (especially if those chats have unread messages). Hiding it behind the “chat with us” button isn’t really good UX in my opinion, especially when that opens a new conversation and you have to click back in that window to get to your chat history.

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