Redesigning Spending

Hello! :wave:

For today’s Sneak Peek, we’d like to share a presentation that @zancler gave recently, showing off some new designs for the spending tab.

Highlights:

  • 4:30 - new look spending tab and dial
  • 5:00 - spending tracking demo (and an open call to suggest names for this feature!)
  • 7:00 - the new breakdown screen (Spending/Scheduled/Income/Pots)
  • 8:20 - new categories!
  • 10:45 - user testing
  • 13:00 - what’s next?

I’ll also merge in some comments that have already popped up about this :slight_smile:

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Also shared here - Last week's events in Liverpool 🎉

Was from the event in Liverpool… :slight_smile:

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Ahhh that answers my question then :wink: recent video so development is not very far ahead of that video :see_no_evil:

From what I’ve seen in the video, and some of the description - it’s basically designs at this moment, not working prototype.

We’re knee deep in building it all right now and super excited about it :grinning:

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I literally can’t wait… its one of the key things I joined Monzo for and as the video rightly said… “its broken”

Maybe can we go belly-deep? Or chest deep? :wink: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Jokes aside… I can’t wait!

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This is something I’m looking forward to seeing! I currently use Emma for budgeting as I like being able to split between subscriptions and also general expenses like food shopping or Starbucks! The one thing I hate is having to use a separate app to manage that!

Can’t wait to see this introduced.

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This looks amazing! I love how it’s been fundamentally rethought (that was definitely necessary). It addresses pretty much every issue I’ve had or has been raised on the forums. I particularly like the new way that expenses and holiday tagging works, and also the ability to mark recurring payments. Any chance that the transport icon could also get a redesign, @zancler?! :grin: :pray:

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This looks great, particularly excluding transactions from the spending breakdown, a few people have been asking for that. I’d prefer excluding entire categories like saving (if that existed :slight_smile: ), but this’ll do for excluding that sort of thing from targets manually.

The new breakdown screen looks nice, I can imagine eventually including Savings accounts in there (like a S&S ISA for example). People shouldn’t really save long-term with Monzo at present due to the negative real return.

Interesting that some categories are now applied like labels alongside other categories - it’d be nice to see this across all categories rather than special-cased - there are many cases where multiple tags might be useful (Family spending on meals for example). This would then of course let you add user defined categories without breaking any of your core assumptions about categorising data automatically. Sad to see no mention of this here (unless I missed it).

The 2 new categories are… underwhelming. I’d hoped to see a bit more progress there, at least excluding categories which are not required by that user. Great to see at least some progress on this though, even if it is not things I’d personally use. Most people with families will have a joint account, something Monzo doesn’t offer, so for me family is not going to be very useful without that as spending goes on the joint card.

As a more top-level point, which ties into your negative feedback from users on that slide - I’d love to see Monzo focus on positive guidance - most targets/goals from Monzo here and other apps tend to focus on nagging users about spending too much on coffee - it’d be nice to invert this and make targets all about goals - saving for a holiday, for a bike, for a deposit for a house, saving for pensions etc, it’d be really great to see a bank encouraging people to focus on saving, not on spending, and positive reinforcement is far more effective than negative feedback, particularly for the people who need this advice most. So I much prefer the idea of reverse targets and think they should be the focus rather than targets.

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Love these videos, however could you please employ an audio visual person, and give them an equipment budget. It seems every video has audio and visual issues! Can make them tough to sit through. That video is headache inducing with the wavy washed out images, and I’m am watching the Open Office January video right now, but I’m going to have to turn it off cause the buzz through it is too much.

It’s just a shame is all.

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I was very excited about this when I saw it in the event. It would be so much more useful to me than what pulse or the popup notifications tell me (you have spent £20 at xxx. You are spending too quickly). I prefer pastel icons though. I thought it fit in better with Monzo’s app design- or are you guys trying to go neon for everything possible?

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Told you I was excited by this overhaul :tada:

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Please bear in mind that what you’re seeing are very early designs :pray:

You could see quite a few changes before release - especially based on the testing we perform when we turn these designs into a fully-functional product!

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“very early” designs shared 10 months ago though - yes I appreciate you have converted 360000 over to a different system and all the hard work that that entails , it just feels like “everything” is… …still …coming … soon …I thought the speed of iteration of “challenger banks” was meant to put legacy banking and their speed of adoption of new features , going through their procedures for acceptance , different departmental responsibilities, risks etc etc etc into the shade :slight_smile: - maybe 10 months from initial public showing to implementation …sooon … is quick :slight_smile:

https://community.monzo.com/t/breakdown/9589?u=iansilversides

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@anon95680666 - I thought I had seen these designs before :rofl: that’s why I asked how old the video was… you do have a point though but :man_shrugging: it’ll be here soon I hope :slightly_frowning_face:

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I hope so too - Im afraid …coming soon… just creates a stick to be beaten with from us impatient, expectant users and almost encourages users to try other offerings - which may, or may not be better than Monzo, rather than talking on the forum about the good and bad points of the latest update , that can then be tweaked by the Monzo design crew based on the feedback - kind of like the prepaid card speed and ethos of shipping new features :slight_smile:

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I’d really like to see ‘Investment/Saving’ as a category, and I hope that the ‘Pots’ category will eventually turn into that.

The financial behaviour that I think should be encouraged is the ‘pay yourself first’ philosophy, where your savings are a bill the same as anything else rather than aiming for an amount left over at the end of the month.

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Really nice to see it in progress, so thanks for sharing.

Everyone has different needs/request of course - I’d love to see more categories but all these improvements look like they’re moving in the right direction.

Would be interesting to knowing where the idea for these new categories came from, was it user testing, or internal polling, or looking at user transaction data? I ran a poll a little while back and there were some interesting suggestions.

Please don’t call it a ”thick bar” :rofl: it’s a type of meter, so maybe a ”roto meter” thingy or maybe just a meter.

The rest of it is superb and I’m really keen to see how how you’re gonna redesign it for iOS.

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“The rope” - depending on where the hand is, you either have a good grasp on the rope or you are letting it slip out of reach!

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