Intro to Core Experience 🎉

giorgio · 3 February 2023 09:41

Yes please We cannot wait

JIMMWX · 3 February 2023 09:47

I have nothing to add other than the level of interaction here between Monzo and customers is

N26throwaway · 3 February 2023 12:42

Someone must be desperate to dethrone @TheoGibson’s team at the next Peter G awards!

TheoGibson · 3 February 2023 14:41

I haven’t told you yet about my new team at Monzo yet - it’s called the free money for community members team

Peter_G · 3 February 2023 15:05

And the Life Award goes to…

Peter_G · 3 February 2023 18:23

Wait no longer! (Well, have this and wait a bit more. Much more incoming )

Let’s get straight to it.

Support

So much to say, but let me limit myself to the tech:

You (still) can’t go and look at previous chats without starting a new one. That seems to waste everyone’s time. Can we browse old stuff without starting a new one?
The Monzo chat system doesn’t do capitals. At least on Android. So the first letter is always lower case; the same after a full stop. Please fix this. It makes me irrationally angry.

Transaction screen

The payments history section was great when Monzo was little. But now we have years of history it feels like it needs to be a bit more sophisticated. With inflation, I’m not sure the average over all time figure is useful. Instead, perhaps rolling average over the last 12 months? It would also be super cool to be able to tap on the figures and be taken to some Trends analysis…
Tapping on the number of payments field is inconsistent. It seems to search on the name rather than a unique ID. So if I find a faster payment to myself, the number of payments is correct, but tapping into it shows many more transactions, because it’s searching for my name not for that specific sort code/account number combination.
You can’t upload PDFs as receipts. As I get a bunch of those from email now, that’s annoying.
On Android, the raw direct debit data (the bit right at the bottom of the transaction screen) is missing. It really needs to be there - it helps when things go wrong or merchant enrichment isn’t quite right.
Similarly, on Android, faster payments references go into the notes field and can be amended. On iOS it’s a separate field. That feels more robust to me. A cry for parity!
#tags don’t autocomplete on Android. They do on iOS (if you turn it on in Labs). It’d be cool to make more of tags - having them in a separate field would be cool. And being about to see them in Trends (as an alternative to the category or merchant view) would be next level. Alternatively (or in addition) having tags as subcategories would be cool.
There’s no way of manually entering data into the receipts API. I’ve said before it would be nice to link that into the Flex transactions, but I’d quite like to be able to enter line items myself. Bonus points if we can categorise/tag each entry separately or use them to drive splits/tabs.
It would be good to have more granularity on the repeating payments option. I have a direct debit that is taken three times a month but at irregular intervals. It would be excellent to cope with more edge cases. Can you basically borrow repeating appointments from your favourite calendar app everywhere that needs repeating dates?
Conversely, and I’m very keen for this can we please label incoming payments (think salary) as repeating so that the Balance bit of Trends works? Manually created future transactions so Monzo knows that there’s a payment planned for the future would help too.
The “Flex it” box is a bit too big for my liking. Could it be slimmed down? (My personal preferences are the most important feedback obvs).
When you go to change a category, can we just have the categories in alphabetical order? The artificial distinction between custom and standard categories isn’t helpful (for me at least). And we’ll get to it, but the 50 category limit is bad. Very bad. It makes me sad.

That’s it for now. I’m going through the app so this might take some time. More (much more) to come.

Edit: a few extra things for the transaction screen:

Can we find a way to pull/push the value of a transaction to/from a pot? If I pay in £50 cash I’d like to be able to tap on the transaction and send that directly to a pot, or to pick an existing payee and send it to an external account. Similarly, I’d love to be able to tap on a card payment and pull that value from a pot.
A PDF statement for individual transactions is a popular request. That would also help meet this need…

Peter_G · 3 February 2023 19:52

Next instalment:

The Feed.

Granted, many of these might be more for #app-evolution, but I thought it’s worth covering here.

It’s really difficult to scrub to different years. Other apps find a way of the scroll bar being used to jump around if there’s a lot of scrolling. That would be handy here.
We really need parity of search between Android and iOS. I want to be able to search/filter by date, merchant, location, payment type (MasterCard/faster payments/Bacs), card (physical/virtual) and how it was paid (Google Pay, chip and PIN, contactless etc). That lot of information could also handily be on the transaction screen.
I’d like to be able to sort the feed by something else other than date. For example by values, by merchant, or by country. In the latter case, some collapsible subheadings would be groovy.
Once you’ve sorted / filtered to your hearts content, it would be nice to be able to export that data. Or set up a live Google sheets export…

amc65 · 3 February 2023 20:08

Joint account love please - @davidwalton has posted many times on the topic. Obviously not all have these but those that do would love them to be comparable with single accounts.

jzw95 · 3 February 2023 20:12

Search on iOS is definitely better than (what I understand) is on Android, but it still needs some work. Critically, there’s no way to search for a specific amount or transactions on a specific date. This makes it very difficult to locate a transaction sometimes and I’ve had to resort to exporting to a spreadsheet . Amazingly even Nationwide’s basic app can do these two things easily, so this is not an advanced feature. Especially for a bank that doesn’t allow access through a desktop browser. <\rant>

Peter_G · 3 February 2023 20:15

I think it was @emmag that said if they were going to look at it, they’d rebuild it from scratch for both platforms. Which I think is the right approach. It definitely needs doing, though.

If @giorgio and team want two big things to get their teeth into, my votes would be search and filter (top priority) then the payments screen.

Paulw · 3 February 2023 23:58

Welcome @giorgio There’s been loads of discussion over the years. Some old stuff but some still relevant here:

I think the Payment screen is a bit messy currently and could do with a tidy up. Recent and Frequent seems overkill for example. Other things:
Payee details
I’d love to see payee enrichment similar to how Monzo does merchant enrichment. So the payee has the name, photo/image and previous transactions to/from them on the payee screen. Crucially when the payee pays you it’s the same enrichment as displayed in the contact rather than a hotchpotch of display names that we get now. I’d like the ability to hide Monzo contacts I’m never going to pay. Plus bring back merge payees. It’s gone for me.
Shared tab
I currently have an outstanding owe. This is because I used my joint account with an external person. It’s now saying my partner needs to pay me. They don’t because it was from joint account. There’s no way to settle this so I’m stuck with Friends owe you £XX.
Scheduled
Some proper order to this list. It’s very random right now. Oh and please add Plus/Premium to scheduled payments What about including scheduled payments from pots here as well.
Request
This doesn’t work so well. If I choose a non Monzo contact it brings up the Monzo.me screen then I have to choose the contact in the share sheet. I’m therefore not sure why the list of contacts is there. Perhaps this could be smarter. After all, you have access to my phone contacts so perhaps it could somehow select that contact to send the link to without the need to select via the share sheet.
I look forward to seeing how this develops. Thanks for your input.

Peter_G · 4 February 2023 08:42

The megapost continues!

Pots

The create Pot flow and UI could do with a bit of TLC and updating. It just feels basic and very Mondo right now.
If we’re going to get rid of the card carousel, we’ll need better ways of getting money to/from Pots. I’m all in on the put pot transfers in the Payments tab idea. Treat pot transfers just like any other - including the ability to send directly from a pot to an external account.
And let us send money directly to a Pot from an external account! A little bit of Monzo magic where you put the pot name as a #tag in the payments reference perhaps. So #Bills would go straight to my Bills pot without bouncing through my current account.
Let us pay for bills from savings pots! And make them instant access. Plsthx.
Here’s a big one for me: tweak the Left to Pay section under the manage tab for bills pots so it’s clear what transactions are in this period and what are in next. At the moment, tapping Upcoming gives me a chronological list of payments that will come from that pot. I’d like a nice division between what’s left this budgeting period and what’s in next. With subtotals please!
I get why there’s a division between virtual card payments and DD/SOs here, but I kinda just want one chronological list. Maybe an overlaid icon to show what type of transaction it is?
I’d really really really really like to be able to tell Monzo not to expect the next upcoming payment. This month and next I don’t pay council tax. I’d like to be able to tell Monzo to take that into account. Basically, let me add/remove/manage future transactions please.
I’m not sure why Monzo Products have a separate section. And when you tap into it I just get all scheduled payments to select from. So this feels like a bug/mislabeling.
But for everything good and proper in the world, can we please have the ability to pay for Plus/Premium from a pot? Please.
Finally on the manage tab, I worry that total deposits/withdrawals make even less sense than on the transactions screen. My bills pot value is now immense. I’m not sure what the right answer is. 12 month rolling average? Last calendar year? It would be a shame to lose it completely.

Edit: late addition!

When a direct debit is showing in the feed, the predicted value doesn’t change in bills pots or the payments tab. It really ought to - it’s a nice bit of gloss, but it also just makes everything work a bit more smoothly.

Peter_G · 4 February 2023 13:08

This is so so important!

I thought that creating payee groups would lead to that, but alas no.

I do think the whole payees system / interface needs an overhaul. Most high street bank apps (not to mention Starling) have a better, more intuitive UI.

I’d start again from first principles.

Paulw · 4 February 2023 13:16

Yes you’re right, starting from scratch would probably help more than fixing what’s there already.

Peter_G · 4 February 2023 15:55

So so many things.

It seems to be that the tab is trying to do two things (social and payments). Both of them badly.

I’ll do a proper deep dive as part 63268 of my megapost, but here are some pain points:

The design is old and the header and tabs at the top don’t match elsewhere in the app.
The Payments tab is just a list of functions that becomes repetitive. The friends owe you bit always displays even if the figures are zero. The Pay Someone box opens up a nice UI, but your Recents list isn’t recent. And you can’t get rid of folk you don’t want to see there. Likewise you can’t remove or edit contacts from that screen.
The Request Money link is identical. Is there a way to have a contacts list that you can then choose to pay/request from?
The See Payees link then gives me a third way of seeing the same information. But again I can’t manage, edit or hide them.
Then I get a section for shared tabs. But all my shared tabs are settled. This is a waste of screen space. If I tap into it, I see the app’s most basic UI. I’m down for streamlined elegance, but this looks unfinished.
And if I do have shared tabs open, there’s the same UI disarranged sparceness. And last time I used one, there was no warning or no calculation before settling up. That was unsettling (this is a pun. I’m sorry). More here.
We then get to Bill Splits and Requests - which aren’t even driven off this screen (they start from the transaction screen). More wasted space.
I have to scroll down to find the section most useful to me: Frequent. But again they’re not really Frequent. I have one person I’ve paid once in third position and a seemingly random group behind that. I’m still confused about the difference between Frequent and Recent (I mean, I know that the English language definitions are, but the Monzo interpretation of each is random).
Finally, I have Recents. Again.

Now, when I finally try and make a payment…

Monzo only remembers one reference (you used to be able to pick until the last “upgrade”)
If I initiate a payment by selecting a previous transaction from the feed, the “Account Type” field is reset so I always need to pick it. And a random previous reference is populated.
Not all bank logos are shown. The community even has a lovely wiki to make life easy for you!
There’s no way to apply split categories for a bank transfer. You have to pick a category, go back to the feed after and then split it there. But if you do that too quickly the change in category won’t take and it’ll ping back.

As for the Scheduled tab:

No references are shown for standing orders (when I have five payments to myself I kinda need to see the reference)
The ordering appears to be random and there’s no clear distinction between what is coming out this period and what’s next.
Subscriptions (that you can create yourself) are mixed in with direct debits.
You only get last paid details for direct debits if you don’t have a subscription set up and only get next payment date and value if you do. Both are valuable bits of info.
If you tap on “Add Scheduled Payment” at the bottom you can’t pick from your payees - it just expects you to enter details manually.

I’m really sorry if it feels like I’ve gone in on this tab. But it’s horrible. The worst experience in Monzo. Please remove it, disinfect where it was and start again.

(I’ll be back with some ideas on what I’d like to see in that tab instead )

Peter_G · 4 February 2023 19:42

Between the Core Experience and App Evolution teams, another candidate for an overhaul is the Plus/Premium tab.

Some relevant thoughts:

And a topic about it:

The tl;dr is that it’s a whole bunch of different things all thrown together - some links within the app, some actual functions, some shortcuts to features best put elsewhere.

I know that some folks like the tab (I don’t for the record) but if it does stay it’s another candidate for a first principles review.

darylbaxter · 5 February 2023 19:17

Great to hear.
If Pots to Pots came out soon I’d open a Fixed Term Pot straight after, I’m sure many others will too.

Peter_G · 5 February 2023 20:15

To come back to this, I think a major part of polish - and moving from a good to a great - experience is about joining up different parts of Monzo.

For example, I’ve mentioned previously that exposing the receipting API to the app might be useful in splitting categories and for splitting bills/shared tabs. And that adding itemised Flex receipts to transactions to show what you’re paying off might add a wow factor.

But the same thing applies to Pots. It would be superb if the new pot flow was focused on what the user is trying to do. Are they trying to save money? Savings pots. Are they trying to pay for bills? Bills pots.

Imagine that in one flow you can set up a pot, choose which bills to pay out of it, set up a standing order to feed that pot to a certain value every one, and set up a virtual card to pay directly from that pot. And making that all super evident and straightforward from the UI. That would be Monzo magic.

12jprince · 6 February 2023 13:44

Really dont like this new user design experience by Monzo if im honest - seems too child like with pastal colours and big bold fonts. I would prefer to see a more clean, crisp approach that looks slightly more to the previous user experience Monzo had.

kolok · 6 February 2023 14:55