Pots Goals are now out of Labs!

When developing new features you can’t just release it to everyone because thats just risky and stupid - you typically release to a small subset of users who smoke test it in the real world and provide feedback like bugs or issues they are having and gradually roll it out to everyone. Thats what labs is for imo. I suspect behind the scenes the Monzo team are monitoring usage and possibly doing some A/B testing to help make some subtle changes to help the UI to make it easier to use.

For such a small feature I’m not sure how much could have really changed from a visual point based of user feedback tbh. It’s a simple change and it works well and solves a problem around saving towards a goal. This and many of the other comments don’t seem to helpful to be honest.

No offence meant in any way but as someone who designs products for another tech company, you can’t always please everyone and I’m sure Monzo have so many other great things up their sleeves which can provide more value that they want to focus their time on.

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I was about to say exactly the same. Sometimes, you put something in a beta and the feedback is either contradictory, irrelevant or doesn’t reach enough of a critical mass to disprove your hypothesis. That’s when stuff should go to Production in a firm like Monzo. There is nothing on this thread about what, specifically, should be different…?

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I say a lot of things mate lol

Anyways like @HoddzDJ said I don’t get why this was in labs for I mean you set a figure and thats it. I used it once for the 1p challenge thing and it did what is was meant to so I dunno how else I could have tested it.

Shame other things such as Summary, pulse graph and now coin jar couldn’t have gone to labs and just stayed there till fixed.

That would have been nice but they all came out before Labs existed..

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Summary was in labs, I remember as I turned it on hated it then turned it off again.

Pulse was not though.

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The Summary still needs work yes & the team’s acknowledged that it was released from Labs too soon but it was always going to roll out to all users no matter what.

For the vast majority, it’s a big improvement vs the old functionality. If it hasn’t fixed the issues that you had with what we had before then you’re no worse off anyway.

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Really? My goal still shows as £100.0

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I tested it, loved the idea and functionality and didn’t find any critical show stopping issues that should stop it going live, least nothing that wasn’t addressed. It’s a testing platform not a development platform. I’m sure the guys will take on board further development ideas for future iterations.

It’s silly things like this that should have been quick and easy to fix before bringing out of labs!

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What’s with the .0 ? :man_facepalming:t2:

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@enmasser @Paulw Are you iOS, because appears correctly on my Android screen?

Hey all, thanks for the feedback here. When your default operating principle is ship early and iterate, it can sometimes be tricky to work out the right balance when it comes to something being in Labs vs not.

A feature like Pots goals has a pretty low risk, so we probably could have just released it to everyone as an early version, and fix issues that arose - but as it was a quick one-day experiment, we felt it would make sense to make it opt-in for a little bit first.

A week after the first version was released, some fixes were made to the Android app, so you could remove goals (we forgot about that), and we showed a version of the progress bar that made sense for the current Android pots layout.

The feedback we got was mostly requests for added features, rather than any show stopping issues - so we felt it was safe enough to enable for all, and add more functionality when we could prioritise it (or another Monzo Time came around).

If there are bugs we haven’t caught, we’ll work to fix them as soon as possible.

Thanks again!

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But there WERE some issues. I mean, the single digit pence is mentioned just a few posts back, and that’s clearly not been addressed.

Got to say, I enjoyed how you engaged with us and told us if something was not a chance of being implemented / to be considered / being changed soon. Oops, oh no, none of that happened other than in my fevered imagination! :man_shrugging:

I have no interest in the scale of a change, if you ASK for us – the community – to effectively beta test new features, the very least you can do is respond to our feedback. You didn’t. This was a fail.

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We’re fixing up the single digit pence issue at the moment. We didn’t feel at the time it was making the feature hard to use, more of a cosmetic problem - it’s still worth fixing, but didn’t seem like something that should prevent more people from having access to the feature without knowing where to look and opting in.

That being said, it’s totally fair that we could have done a better job responding to the feedback and saying what was fixed, still on our list, and what we’re not planning to change.

The main things we heard that are on my squad’s list to look into in the future are:

  • Setting a target date to reach your goal
  • Helping people set scheduled based on their goal and target date
  • Making it possible to set a goal when creating a pot
  • Finding a layout for Pots that makes it easier to see the balances (and goal status) of more than one pot at a time.

Thanks again :bow:

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The way you do this on the Joint Account via Labs topic is the way to go (multiple posts condensing issues into a concise synopsis and detailing your solution to it/expected resolution), although I do think the first post in the topic should also be kept up to date with all issues and their status too, even once corrected.

This, to me, is more than a cosmetic problem! I shouldn’t have to create a pot THEN edit it to set a goal. The rest are fine to be looked at, but this is core functionality IMO.

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iOS yep. Seems a fix is coming

Disagree on that one personally. The functionality is all there, it’s just somewhat inconvenient to require a two pass edit in order to use it all.

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Riiiiight.

Really? Entering a screen a second time was more than just inconvenient? I guess we just see things in a radically different way then!

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@Jami - Really appreciate you coming on and explaining your POV.

The only comment I’d like to make is one I made earlier - I think the explanation of Labs (or maybe even certain features that hits labs) need to be a little better.

Maybe I’m alone here, but if you give your customers the opportunity to offer feedback on a feature (via opt in), before it’s released to everyone, then it should be really polished when it hits the mass market - Even if all the potential new features aren’t there, the actual cosmetics and existing functionality should be 100%

The pence thing is an example of that - It’s a visible annoyance that was picked up early on, yet wasn’t fixed before being released to the public.

It feels a little like releasing it so soon (before the little things were fixed), was more about hitting a target than anything else.

For what it’s worth, I completely agree that it could have easily been released to the public, and never have entered the Labs.

But as soon as it did enter Labs, the expectation was that it should be a polished version when leaving the Lab.

Releasing now, almost undermines the whole point of Labs, and is likely to dis-engage people.

This isn’t supposed to be a negative reaction to it, but possibly if things are going to hit Labs in the future, we can get a little more of an update at the start, and ongoing updates to engage the people “testing it”.

Cheers

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