The key point for me was actually the section below that’s in bold
back when Hugo and I started on Targets there was quite some back and forth, and the reversed bar was the biggest area of concern in testing. We pushed forward with it because we found that when used with real money, and when you are observing the bar increase/decrease in line with your spending, there’s very little confusion; it’s more so a problem when just looking at a static PNG and trying to understand it
when it comes to whether it’s counterintuitive, interestingly I noticed yesterday that Loot have a similar design -
Edits to posts after the 5 minutes, that users are given to tweak posts, are flagged (as yours has been) by the marker -
I removed the comment (10-15 minutes before you created your post) because I reread your earlier posts & felt it was unjustified. You can consider that sentence as having been taken back.
I really like the bars the way they are… For me, I’m not aiming to spend my entire budget and hit a target as such - it’s a (slightly rare) bonus if I have any left
The right to left direction, and the bolder colours to show what I have left, indicate to me that the money is draining away slowly, which is exactly what’s happening in my account. To me it makes a lot of sense and feels intuitive
(This is the way it works in another budgeting app I’ve used so it’s not that off the wall I don’t think)
The purpose of this screen is to help people budget, I think the issue is terminology not UX…
Targets are used when you are aiming to get to something, so if you were aiming to spend all of your department budget before the end of the financial year then Andy’s version would make sense. But that isn’t the aim of this feature.
You aren’t aiming to spend a certain amount, you are trying to limit yourself to a certain amount…
Monzo has effectively created a data visualisation (some kind of bar chart) that shows you how much of your budget is remaining in relation to the original balance, so really the issue is the terminology is incongruent with the purpose of the feature.
Calling this feature “Budgets”, and the actual amount your “limit” would probably make more sense, however I still think people would be unhappy, but at least it would have a better argument, in that you are:
Setting a limit for how much you want to spend, and this shows your remaining balance within that budget category.
Rather than:
Setting a target for how much you want to spend.
This would work if it could some how show in the data visualisation how far over you were month on month and you were targeting down to a number rather than up to a limit.
I agree, ‘budget’ and ‘limit’ sound much more restrictive/ chlostrophobic. I can also see the point about it not being a target but then again it is a more empowering feeling word and in a way I do treat it as a target to come within budget
I’m not sure whether the spending screen is 100% accurate. For instance, in this screenshot, I’ve exceeded my target spending for general (and everything else lol) but its still shown green as if under spent? Not very visual if I need a quick overview of my spending!
marker -
despite your logic, here’s why Monzo went with Targets -
in the top right hand corner of the quote, to view the formatted version of this post.