Icons confusion

Feedback & Ideas
1

As the title says, I think the current usage of icons in the feed can create confusion and may need a small tweak.

Short version
Do away with the small piggy icon and replace it with a permanently visible Category icon for every transaction.

Long version
Right now icons representing categories and initials of contacts / businesses, are all interchangeable - sometimes it’ll be Tesco, sometimes it’ll be Grocery, depending on whether the particular business has a brand logo. There’s also the small ‘piggybank’ icon next to almost every single transaction because I use Monzo’s great coin-jar feature.

A lot of UI elements has to be considered design-wise, but I don’t want to write an essay, so I’ll simplify.

  1. Tesco doesn’t always mean grocery for me, it can be expenses, holiday, shopping, personal care and so on: the main problem is that most of the time I can’t tell a transaction’s category at a glance. To check, I have to open up each transaction separately and confirm it there. This is way too cumbersome, I should be able to see this immediately, at a glance, because the accuracy of my entire financial control depends on it.

  2. The small piggy icon on almost every transaction is a pointless waste of space. I subscribed to it, I know what it does, I don’t need to be reminded about it line after line on 99% of transactions. It’s a waste of space.

So, do away with the piggy icon and replace it with a permanently visible Category icon for every transaction.

I am then only going to need to go inside a specific transaction to change category if it’s incorrect, not to actually see what it is.

Put the piggy icon into transaction view and not in the feed, or alternatively consider a little filter/toggle button on the opposite end of the search stripe, similar to iOS Apple email functionality: quick toggling between piggy and category icons.

The bottom line is that permanent Category icon view is critically more important than permanent piggy icon view, in my opinion and from my experience of using the app.

note: I’ve created a similar, longer topic on the subject with looong title before, but decided to write it again with simpler title, shorter explanation and better solution, since it concerns something I believe to be fundamentally important to Monzo’s functionality. Hope I’m not commiting a forum crime!

2 Likes
2

If you go to summary and select a category you can see the transactions assigned to it. That would allow you to see your expenditure a lot more clearly.

When they were discussing changing how Coin Jar items were shown in the feed they said they had to indicate it on the feed in some way. The transaction and coin jar individual notifications weren’t popular so this was the solution. A small dot isn’t as visible. Some people have suggested it should be listed under the merchant name instead so both totals are on the main feed.

3

Hey, I do know what you mean, it’s a tricky balance.

I know I can do the thing with summary and category, but that’s a different beast altogether and not very efficient: the whole power of the feed is that you can see things quickly and easily on the go, time-relative.

From my perspective, beyond any doubt, an ability to see category for each transaction at a glance is far more useful and important than knowing a few pennies just went into my coin jar - they do almost every single time and at my own wish, I feel it’s hardly a critical information as compared to Category, though I respect the opinions to the contrary and would love to hear why piggy icon is considered more important an info.

I really hope guys at Monzo will give this a second thought.