Redesigning Spending

Not sure I agree with hiding what’s owed from spending. You’ve spent that money until it’s paid back. At the end of the month we could get weird scenarios where spending says you still have money but there is none in your account. Correct me if I’ve misunderstood your ideas there?

I’d personally like to see another visual que on the new spending dial representing where you would be if all your money owed was paid back.

Interms of how the app realises money is owed, I’d like to see the bill splitting feature get a lot smarter. When used it would be great if it automatically created a visual on the transaction page, like the example someone posted above, with the breakdown of the split bill and status of repayments. I don’t know if this is possible, but if a unique url on the request link we share could then tie incoming payments to that transaction and mark them as paid when we receive money back it would a very sophisticated system that’s easy for the end user.

Then a global view of all bill spit requests would be the icing on the cake.

I currently use Monzo, Pennies and Splitwise to manage my money. This kind of functionality would make Monzo the only app I need.

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I like the concept of reverse targets. Could this tie into pots? If a user is on track for hitting their target, why wait until the end of the month to give them positive feedback? At any point you could say those savings have partly materialised, and transfer them to a special pot.

Here’s an example of how it could work:

Lets say you have a disposable income of £900 per 30 days, and want to save £90 of that. Per day, that’s a hard budget of £30, but you really need to spend below £27 to hit your target. If on day 1 you do spend £27 then you’re meeting your goal. £3 could be automatically transferred to your savings pot. At this point you can just forget about the £30 allocated to that day. Your progress donut should say you have £870 for the next 29 days, and you still need to maintain the same level of spending.

If you spent £28 instead of £27, then you’ve still saved something (£2) but you’re not on track to hit your goal, so the per day “spending limit” should be lowered to get you back on track. If you spent more than £30, then you’ve saved nothing AND your per day spending limit should be lowered.

If you consistently miss your target, at some point spending your whole income will become inevitable. At this point you are eroding any savings you already built up, so maybe Monzo should empty that pot again and tell you off.

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I’d have a little box saying amount currently owed alongside account balance. I’d probably ditch the pulse to give more of that data on the top of the main transaction feed. You’d know what you’ve spent, what is owed and what your current balance is.

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Improvements will be worthless if Monzo is not used.
Get Apple pay.

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Firstly I guess thank you for sharing an early design. It’s brave but hopefully the comments in the thread are useful. What drew me to Monzo was the community feel and this really helps.

The ring I think is great but I’d suggest a tweak:

  • at the start of the period I had X amount.
  • the fixed/regular outgoings should be shown taking up a portion of the ring.
  • the remaining unallocated cash can just be a simple day-by-day burndown of what’s left over (a bit like the burndown charts in an Agile methodology)

Can I ask why the need for fixed categories? I’m fairly sure some relatively simple machine learning could be employed to let people create their own categories and then learn how to categorise payments based on the user doing some training.

What you’re proposing is a good step forwards on what we have now.

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When updating the design it would be a great time to consider making the app universal so that it fits other device screens, e.g. iPad.

It jars a bit that the Monzo app doesn’t fit natively on my iPad when sitting next to it is my legacy banking app which looks fine.

The design updates looks great though. I was actually considering switching to Starling but this is one of things that kept me hanging in for Monzo. Excited to see the results.

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Do you really want monzo to create another development branch beyond iPhone and android now?

Maybe in a while when they’ve settled iOS vs Android down and taken key functionalities beyond the MVP?

You are right though, might as well design as you intend to go on…

As far as I understand it, when you’re designing an iOS app you can do so for a single device - iPhone or iPad - or you can create a ‘universal’ app that will run on both and adapt its layout accordingly. So you avoid creating another development branch, but there is obviously a little more effort involved in building the UI in an adaptive way.

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I’m curious as to how well it works as is, if they just change the deployment target in XCode to ‘Universal’ rather than just ‘iPhone’.

The iPad does tend to have a more square screen size which effectively gives less height, resulting in more scrolling.

The Android team will already be catering for these varying screen sizes, so the design of the interface for larger devices could also be applied to the iPad?

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Very good point about the design already having to cater for different device sizes on Android. I hope that means a universal app could be in consideration.

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I love the look of this, can’t wait to get it on my account. It’s these money management changes that will make me move my salary over.

All going in right direction and love the transparency.

Surprised that catagories have to be hardcoded. Couldnt users name their own ones like you can with pots? Most budgetting apps work that way surely?

@zancler Nice to see some new spending categories. Wondering, though, how come you’re not expanding to custom categories? Are they particularly hard to implement?

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Anybody from Monzo like to comment on how holiday spending will work in the redesign? Looks like the holidays category has gone.

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They mentioned Holiday was going to be similar to expenses (9:00), so maybe you put it in Holiday mode (or it detects you are abroad and prompts it). Spending would then be Original Cat. + Holiday.

Hoping if that’s the case there is a toggle per transaction like shown for expenses (but only appears if you are in holiday mode).

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I think this looks fantastic, great job everyone involved, thank you for putting this video up. It really helps to explain where this particular feature is going, and creates a lot of excitement.

PLEASE PLEASE do a similar video for the pulse graph. I still don’t have a clue what it is for and why it is useful (and I think a lot of others are equally confused by it). At the moment there is just a lot of talk about how “it will be useful in the future”. If we could have some kind of sneak peek video explaining the pulse graph and where it is heading, people might be a bit more excited for it as well.

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This’d be more useful if the “spent” number was actually accurate. It’s always a lot higher than how much I’ve actually spent so I’ve stopped really even paying attention to it.

That doesn’t really make sense. Nasty bug if true though. Can you explain?

Thanks, Chris!

You might also be interested in checking out our recent Pulse Q&A. There’s lots of info there about the future of Pulse.

And for everyone else here, our most recent Monzo Insider was about user testing and redesigning spending.

Some more views of the above info from around 4:45 onwards.

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I can’t remember from when I watched the video in the original post, how are targets going to work in this redesign? Does the “left to spend” amount cover everything that’s in our account but isn’t in a pot, or is it based on a target? Are there still targets per category in this redesign; if so, how would we manage our “shopping” or overall target if we purchase a big item (like a TV) one month?