Pots Goals are now out of Labs!

@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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I feel like there might be a middle ground here. There’s several benefits (besides collecting feedback) of releasing stuff to Labs. It also gives us a chance to give feedback and if significant issues are reported, then presumably the team will hold off making the feature available to everyone until it’s fixed. But setting the standard that everything that’s reported is asking too much. Every Monzo feature has imperfections and trying to fix everything is not the most productive use of the team’s time.

Having said that, I would have liked to have seen more engagement from the team in the feedback thread, like the posts that Jamie’s now made in this one, to manage user’s expectations, explain what’s being worked on & acknowledge the feedback that’s been given.
Users are putting up with each of these topics turning into a mini trash fire of the same issues being reported again & again and are taking the time to try to help respond to those posts in these dedicated feedback threads. If the team’s not going to respond, then it would be better to switch back to having dedicated topics for each bug, in my opinion, to avoid users posting the same issues repeatedly.

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100% agree with that - Which is why I think a little more explanation each time is probably the way to go.

There will likely be some really early ideas that hit Labs, which will need a lot of love and feedback before going live.

Then there are the features like Goals for Pots, which are pretty much there already, so there won’t be many changes at all, before it goes live.

But the way I understood Labs was… Early adopters get to test new features before they go live, and offer feedback, find bugs etc - Monzo do such a good job of listening to their customers (usually), that I really see the value here.

If a feature is almost already there (Pots for Goals), perhaps a little explanation before hand would set the expectation for users who are “testing” out the feature in Labs.

The amount of times I see “I haven’t read this thread, so not sure if it’s already been said” before posting a bug/issue which has been mentioned 5 million times is astounding.

Not sure how you can combat that one.

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Do you have any thoughts on this idea?

This sort of post is exactly what I wanted. Thanks @Jami.

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Isn’t that what the “Search this topic” checkbox in the search bar is for?

Capture

No because user’s are being asked to report all feedback in one thread. If there were dedicated topics for each bug report (as I suggested), then the search would work (to the extent that people actually use it) & the CC could move duplicate posts into the existing topics.

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The problem here is with the users, not Monzo.

I’m not sure how you can get users to read past posts - This forum is becoming harder and harder to keep up to date with - I went away for 5 days last week, and missed 1000’s of posts.

The search functionality works well - Yet you still see new threads about the same topics (often, only 2 or 3 threads away from the last one!)

The coral crew do a good job of keeping it together, but the only thing I can think of is if Monzo came on once every couple of days with an update on certain things.

Then, whenever anyone posted a duplicate post because they hadn’t read the thousands of posts previously, someone could quote the latest Monzo response.

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Yeah that’s what I mean though. If everyone is posting bugs into the one topic (like this one), surely they can use the search box and tick “Search this topic” to see if what they’re about to post has already been discussed on this topic?

Of course, it relies on users actually utilising it but a solution is there…

Thank you we do try! :smiley:

It can be difficult deciding wether to merge or split a thread as topics on here can grow rapidly and go off topic quickly and we also don’t always know an existing topic already exists to merge to.

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You’ll get the hang of it :wink:

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