Redesigning Spending

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?

It’s pretty touchy about counting incoming payments against what’s been spent that month.

This looks very close to perfect for my personal needs. For me personally, targets have limited use.

I’ve had to calculate my bills (rent/utilities/internet) and set that as a target, then divide the rest of my monthly income into various other targets (£X for food, £Y for eating out - although buying a slow cooker has pretty much eliminated my pizza purchases :smiley: - etc).

What this means is, if I end up at Tesco to buy another round of ingredients for the next 4 days of slow cooked food at the start of the month, immediately Monzo guilt trips me telling me I’m spending too quickly for my overall target this month.

Getting rid of targets as-is and replacing them with this spending wheel would be pretty good for me :slight_smile:

If you’re already going to be tweaking categories and whatnot, I would love for you to allow splitting any individual transaction into multiple categories.

For instance, if I go to Tesco and buy a batch of shower gel, some TP and whatnot, a bunch of food, and some cider, I would want the ability to say “£X of this transaction was Groceries, £Y was Personal Care, £Z was Eating Out” (as I would probably categorise alcohol as Eating Out in Monzo terms).

In the month of February, I was about £50 over my monthly Groceries target because I spent around that much on one-time or non-essential purchases that should not be classed as Groceries just because it happened at Tesco.

It would be incredibly inconvenient if I had to make separate transactions so that I could manually re-classify an individual transaction as being Eating Out, Personal Care, Household and Groceries. Having to go through Tesco checkout four times in one day is a bit excessive :stuck_out_tongue:

To summarise:

  • I love the new Spending wheel, and I would prefer to have this over Targets (iOS user)
  • Please consider allowing transactions to be split into multiple categories for tracking spending
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