Monzo's UX is too card centric

Jeezuz. Try and introduce a little humour and the post is disected, analysed or critiqued. :roll_eyes:

Sometimes we just need to relax a little. :wink:

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I saw the funny side of it :laughing:

As an early millennial I was fortunate enough to be able to play around in my youth cannibalising old broken desktop PCs into working units. At the time, most of them didn’t even have a cd drive and windows had to be installed via a series of 34 (if I remember rightly) floppy disks.

Though probably most 10 year olds didn’t have access to the same stuff and some in my area were more interested in petrol bombing cars instead.

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if you had to install Windows followed by Office it took ages, so we tried to do dozens simultaneously and just walk down a row of desks swapping disks

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This hasn’t happened quite yet but is due to happen in early April. This may be at least a partial reason why it it feels card centric.

Rest assured, the Monzo design team are working hard to find a more appropriate and long term home for the export to statements feature as evidenced below.

Nope nope noooooope!

image

I’m so thankful for high speed internet installations

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So many thanks @MrArkadin for flagging this.

I agree with you in the sense that we have a bunch of things that are not in the right place, you’re totally right about that. The reason for that is development speed. We try to progress fast and it’s usually faster to add one more switch to a setting panel that already exists that move things around and create 10 times more work. We’re also pending on some abstractions around account(s), pot(s) and maybe even card(s) at some point. Once we’ve done that work we’ll be able to polish and fix some of your concerns about limits, etc. All good in that front, lots of work to be done but we’re aware :+1:

Regarding the card. I think that one is trickier and it’s something we also struggle with. Not so much in the app itself (once we release Breakdown some of the rough edges will disappear and everything will make way more sense) but in how we position the product and marketing communications long-term.

For many of our users Monzo is “that flashy card that sends you real-time notifications when you buy something”. And even though that’s awesome it doesn’t necessarily align with our broader objectives of offering “the best current account in the world” (as we used to say) and potentially even less with “the financial hub for 1 billion people” (as we see Monzo in the long run, something something marketplace :smile: …).

So, it’s a bit hard to say… but yeah, to be card-centric is not necessarily a problem right now but we’ll adjust things for sure as our features evolve and challenge the previous structures. We’ve done it in the past (really back in the day there wasn’t even a “card” screen at all!) and we’ll keep doing it :muscle:

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It definitely feels like the app is starting to outgrow the main navigation options at the bottom of the screen and the Account/Card one is the biggest offender.

Yes. A hamburger menu is the solution to that. You can hide a lot more menu options behind that than you can fit on that clunky bottom menu bar!

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Not sure a hamburger menu is always the best option - usually better as an ‘everything else’ menu rather than a replacement for the bottom bar.

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More or less the kind of great reply I expected from @hugo.

Watching Monzo Insider 6, I was happy to see how pots were implemented in the new Breakdown screen. It’s obvious that :monzo: is aware of the UX issues and is already addressing them.

Of course I don’t expect :monzo: to devalue one of its greatest marketing tools anytime soon, but I’m very eager to see how and when will the “the best current account” start introducing new ways of representing, explaining and managing our money.

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With everything being digitised now though, does the “card” metaphor in the Monzo app, Apple Wallet etc. even make sense? I’ve been thinking it doesn’t. Apple got rid of their skeuomorphism in almost all places but Apple Wallet, which is intriguing to me. I reckon there’s probably a better design for mobile payments, shop reward schemes and things; I might think about it and come up with a mockup sometime.

(I realise that vision is more problematic for Monzo because a lot of their marketing and recognition revolves around the hot coral card, but I’m talking about banks and mobile payment/rewards in general. Also, perhaps whatever non-skeuomorphic design is thought up, it can include branding for the bank—hot coral in Monzo’s case.)

I’m a big fan of skeuomorphic design and think it would be a shame to see it go :frowning:

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So what’s people born pre 1982 called?

I didn’t read much of this thread. However. Replying to the OP -

With Monzo, your card is your account. Look at your card as the thing that your account is held in.

Your card is your account

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1961-1981 is Generation X.

Note that these definitions vary slightly by source, and the dates I use are from William Strauss and Neil Howe, who are Americans. While in modern times the US and UK have enough shared culture that they’re going to match, this is not necessarily the case going back a few hundred years.

Note also that these definitions become less relevant the more culturally distinct a place is, and can’t be applied at all to somewhere completely isolated like, say, North Korea, which will have its own generations.

They vary by source because there is no official defined start and end date, same with millennials :slight_smile:

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Skeumorphism is not bad, I think there should be a balance struck somewhere. At the moment we are going on the other extreme with all this “flat” garbage, and I personally wouldn’t want Monzo going in that direction. The current Monzo UI feels like the right balance between skeumorphism and flat.

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That’s exactly what I was saying. They’re just the opinions of demographers. Some of whom are far more respected than others, and there are some general consensus’ at least within the Anglosphere.

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Screenshot_20180317-115729

In this case I’m not referring to whether the design of the app is flat or not; I’m referring solely to the skeuomorph that is the depiction of a “card” in the app (and, in broader terms, in Apple Wallet and Google Pay’s UI).

Bank cards were engineered to be that shape and size in order to easily fit in people’s pockets or wallets. Digitised payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay don’t suffer from that same physical limitation, so using the card metaphor in the UI doesn’t make sense. It might make sense while we’re still convincing many smartphone and smartwatch users to switch to these digital payment methods—seeing a card in the UI may help them while they’re still transitioning—but once the majority of people pay for things using services like Apple Pay and Google Pay, I do hope this particular use of skeuomorphism is retired.

I agree skeuomorphism has its uses: It makes sense to depict the content of a word processor on a sheet of paper because many people still print things out onto paper that size. But I don’t see a need for a bank card depicted in the UI of Apple Wallet or Monzo—for me as someone who plans to only use Monzo via Apple Pay. (That could mean they could be clever in the future and only show the card in the UI to people who actually use the physical Monzo card.)

I know I’m referring to Apple Wallet and Google Pay’s UI mostly, but that’s only because I think the change needs to come from them. Monzo’s app still uses the card metaphor, so my points are related to Monzo.

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