Pulse for Android

Making Monzo Sneak Peeks (Archived)
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Pulse is coming to Android very soon! :tada:

If you haven’t heard of Pulse, it’s a graph at the top of the app that shows your balance over time. It’s a really handy way to get a quick sense of how your spending is going. It’s been in the iOS app for a while, so we’re really excited to bring it to Android too.

Here’s a demo video to show how it all looks:

So, what do you think? As always, your feedback is very welcome :slightly_smiling_face:

And shoutout to @Tas and @vuokko for their hard work on this :muscle:

Feedback from a previous thread:

  • “Can’t scroll to the first day of any month”
  • “It’s taking up screen space.”
  • “Can I turn it off?”
  • “This update makes scrolling back a few weeks so much easier!”
  • “Pulse/Targets - Pulse may show me the rate I’m spending, but it doesn’t show me where I’m spending”
  • “I think pulse would be much more useful if it’s prediction was better. Showing my direct debits coming out in advance and my pay coming in would really help.”
  • “Can the graph scroll continuously, not snap to months?”
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Fantastic new addition to the app! :tada: Props to the team! :slight_smile:

I’ve been using this for the last couple of months (yay dev menu :wink:) And it’s come a long way! I love the ability to scroll back through the many months of my feed and see how much was spent on any given day. The up and down nature of the graph is slightly meaningless :thinking: I.e. it’s not reflective of the amount - at the start £100 was the peak (first top up) but now my monthly salary is the peak £100 /=/ monthly salary, yet the height of the graph is the same :joy:

It’s not all bad though, the look (on my Pixel 2 XL) is great, fits in nicely and the design is nice. It’s super smooth to scroll through (though swiping left and right snaps at 1 month intervals… to move to a specific day you need to either scroll down the feed or tap on the pulse :slight_smile:

I don’t like a couple of things… It doesn’t show me my expected outgoings, i.e. SO and DD payments! Hoping for a v2 of pulse really soon :crossed_fingers:
It also moved the search button to a FAB (Floating Action Button) which isn’t a problem in and of itself but my muscle memory still sends my thumb flying to the top right of the screen whenever I want to search! :joy: Give me time, I’ll learn :wink:

Lovely all-in-all! Can’t wait to see what future updates bring!! :smiley:

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I quite like the addition of pulse. However, it’s not clear how the future projection works (i.e. Based upon average spend < £ threshold?) and how far into the future my balance is forecasted to last.

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@cookywook

Have you guys managed to sort out the problem where you cannot scroll the pulse graph onto the first day of a month? (by scrolling the feed)

And is does this bug affect everyone or just me :confused:?

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@cookywook

Have you guys resolved the issue where the pulse date amount reflects the true end of day balances for the respective dates?

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A post was split to a new topic: Removed Posts 12/2/2018

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Hey, could you add ‘can the graph scroll continuously, not snap to months?’?

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I don’t see the value of this feature.

My income and bills happen within days of each other so all I’m left with is a blank space with a squiggly line at the bottom where I can’t make anything out.

monzo

I want features to be available to me, not forced on to me. The only reason I chose Monzo over Starling is because you didn’t force me to look at a pulse.

I’m also unhappy about the standard UI on Android being replaced with iOS UI; a menu icon is far more intuitive for a user that has never used an Apple product.

But what I’m most disappointed with is the fact that despite all the negative feedback and Monzo themselves saying pulse doesn’t work well with current accounts, you’ve forged ahead anyway. This isn’t the behaviour I’d expect from a company that listens to its customers.

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I’m using Monzo as my main account. I get salary, I pay my bills, and usual spending goes from Monzo too.

I don’t see Pulse as a useful thing right now and here are three main reasons:

  • I pay bills for whole flat. My flatmate pays me back, but it’s not the most regular thing. This means that at the beginning of the month, my outgoing bills are quite huge (x2), but then mid-end of the month, I get half of bills back. I’m not willing to dedicate extra effort to calculate all bills, or even worse, to chase my flatmate to pay back after each bill happens.

  • I move out remaining money (money saved from previous salary) irregularly to RateSetter. I’m too lazy to do this regularly. :stuck_out_tongue: As an outcome, every now and then, there’s +£1,000 or more and in no way that’s representation of the future spend.

  • Sometimes there are ~5 days where I go without any card purchases. This means that Pulse is not giving me any information really. I still open Monzo, to check dates for things, or to calculate grocery bills. Pulse is more useful if you use your card a lot more, undoubtedly many users fall into this category, just I’m not one of them (perks of working in the middle of nowhere and doing online grocery shopping).

My pulse is going up and down a lot, even though I use Monzo as main account. ‘Down’ is okay, that’s spending. But ‘up’ is irregular and doesn’t really help me predict my spending. I still need to know/think, ‘oh, I’m gonna get £500 rent and other bills’ in a week, so I actually have more money than it looks. That’s the opposite of what Pulse was supposed to do, making future spend more predictable. While it might work in many, if not most user cases, it doesn’t work in mine.

Other thoughts
The implementation is a bit wobbly. Only after getting detailed instructions on Slack, I understood how it actually works in the first place. I thought that Pulse can be only scrolled left and right, but it stuck to current day in historical months. So today I can only scroll to 12th Jan, 12th Dec etc. I don’t understand why it’s not set to specific day of the month (1st or day of salary once we have it as a setting). Tomorrow, when I try to move back a month, it will start on 13th, a bit awkward, behaviour should be more predictable.

Now, second usability (or me not understanding, read it as you want) issue was that I went to 12th Jan, but then wanted to ‘zoom’ to 14th January. And I did it by tap and swipe left/right, trying to get that date while moving pulse left/right. And Pulse wouldn’t stop on my desired date, instead jumped back to 12th Jan. It turns out you can simply ‘tap’ to get 14th Jan. Now, I’m a bit smarter, but I still don’t like this option. :smiley: My initial choice was to tap, hold and move, as it offered more precision on the date. Tapping Pulse, where dates (or even start/end of a month) are not visible, is pretty much trial and error to get correct date. Despite finally understanding Pulse, I’m not sure I’ll use it to find transaction from particular day, I’ll just go for search by merchant name.

I’m also one of those users who want on/off toggle. I don’t like Pulse, never understood the appeal even when I used iphone for CA testing. I don’t want to look at it every day, that’s what my heart says. I tried to approach it with ‘Monzo knows best’ attitude, but it just doesn’t work and I can’t convince myself :roll_eyes: . With other functionalities, like pots, you can decide if you want them or not, they are available but not shoved in my face. Pulse is too intrusive in my opinion, combined with lack of insight in my user case, make it quite annoying overall.

Side note, I would like to understand more how it’s doing it’s job predicting future. Not sure about iOS’ Pulse, but android one doesn’t really show when money is going to end? It just shows arbitrary decline reaching zero on unknown date. Without seeing comparison or week-on-week changes to the line, I probably wouldn’t even notice difference by few pixels up or down. I might blame Pulse for lack of features that are not released/done yet, but since it impacts current usability, it’s another argument to make it a toggle until it’s ready.

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I have said from day one pulse for me is crap and I want to hide it but alas Monzo thinks it’s useful to me but has never explained why…

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Does the idea of this Pulse assume that everyone conforms to the same standard income and expenditure profile (e.g. regular salary and the same bill payments each month)?

What if someone has irregular income payments (e.g. from share dividends which may be quarterly or semi-annually, and of differing amounts)? Or maybe they just add funds via bank transfer from another account as and when their balance is getting low.

I’ll add myself to the list of those who wouldn’t find this useful, and doesn’t like the additional screen space it takes up. Couldn’t there just be a toggle to view it, rather than it being on screen permanently?

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I have to say now that I’ve tried it out I don’t really ‘get’ it.

Like others here (and most people?) I get paid on the last couple of days of the month, most of that leaves again a few days later and the bulk of my spending for the next few weeks is the few hundred pounds left.

In the pulse that represents some huge spikes, and then an ever-so-slowly dropping line that occupies about 5% of the 25% of the screen that pulse occupies.

Is there something I’m missing?

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I always knew this would become an issue, especially with the 5 tabs…

Screenshot_20180212-195951

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Looks like you have a fairly decent resolution.
Unless it’s purposeful look at decreasing your DPI.

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I do, but as discussed over here some users may run a larger font. But it does also appear that iOS has the same larger font issues :stuck_out_tongue:

IMHO 5 tabs is too many, and I know that material design isn’t really being followed here (especially with the dropping of the menu) but there’s quite a lot of information on tabs

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I don’t think Material Design requires a menu, does it? There must be more to it than that.

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No it certainly doesn’t require a menu, but a major part of any app development I’ve ever been involved in requires testing on different devices with different font size/screen scaling settings. What has generally been found is that anything with more than 3 or 4 tabs could be laid out in a better way without just resorting to truncated or scrollable tabs. I know it’s early days here so things will still be re-worked and fixed, I’m looking forward to see how the UI changes and grows with the bank and it’s features!

Unfortunately lots of apps these days are developed by users with more modern devices, often neglecting older but still widely used devices that sometimes have half the screen resolution of current devices (iPhone 5s is old, but still has current apple support).

There’s usually an argument to say that ‘these users are used to websites/apps looking bad, so they should deal with it’, but if you show the designer how it actually appears to a group of users, they will usually try and find a workaround as the app can be a big representation of a brand (especially in Monzo’s case).

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Looking forward to tying this but when will the update be available

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Thanks for reporting this. We’ll look into keeping the sizes fixed so this doesn’t happen.

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Not sure if you missed these @cookywook but I cannot see any responses. :man_shrugging:t2:

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