Targets

[hugo (Hugo Cornejo)]

Hi there,

First of all apologies for not sharing too much design stuff lately. We’ve been focused working on ways to optimise user on-boarding: the period that goes from the day you sign up to the waiting list to the magic moment when you get to love Mondo and use it for all your daily spending. So, as you are all already Mondo-lovers all that work doesn’t really matter to you

Let’s try to compensate our radio silence with a meaty and very very wordy sneak peek. This is an update that impacts pretty much every side of the app. Because of it’s own nature this update is the outcome of a few weeks of explorative design, collaboration (kudos to @sam and @zancler) and tons of feedback from the team, mainly @ole and @tom. Thanks guys!

Now, of course, it’s time to validate some of this work with users so I’m sure you’ll love to be the first to see it

1. Navigation update: Dashboard

This is not particularly sexy but it might interest you. We’re letting go the 2 buttons of the “dashboard” and adding the running balance below it.

We have two reasons to do this:

1. Some people didn’t realise the elements on top were tappable. We increased affordances but it wasn’t enough and we kept getting customer support queries regarding that. This is one of the classic downsides of going bespoke instead of using native controls, as our user base expands beyond the tech-savvy things get harder

2. We want you to be able to tap and scroll the running balance to the future! If we hide it when you scroll to the top then we can’t let you do it because the graph is not there anymore.

The only downside of this solution is that we steal a few vertical pixels from the feed of transactions, but we think it’s a positive trade-off considering the things to come.

This is how it looks:

This is how it works when you scroll to the past or tap into the future:

2. Navigation update: TabBar

At this point you might be wondering “yeah, whatever… how do I access now my card and spending?”. The answer is the TabBar. We’ve talked a few times on this forum about how the TabBar was an structural element that we wanted to keep for the things to come, now is the moment.

As a part of this we’re simplifying the names of our features. Thanks @tristan!

3. Budgets (codename Targets)

After talking with tons of people, reading all the related posts in this forum (thanks a lot to all of you that left suggestions on how you’d like to budget ) and researching other products and literature we realised that budgeting actually means different things to different people. Understanding it completely is not trivial:

1. Budget to estimate events to come. Even though you don’t have any financial problems you just want to have visibility on your future spending and income.

2. Budget to spend less. You don’t want money to become a problem so you want to take control and spend a bit more consciously.

3. Budget to save for something. Either because you want to buy something in particular (a trip, a TV, a bike, etc.) or you just want to create a rainy days fund.

4. Budget as life-style decision. You don’t have any issue ordering Deliveroo every day but you’d like to cook more at home and eat a bit healthier. The same works for transportation, you may want to spend less in Uber and take your bicycle more often, etc.

As well as that we knew two more things:

1. On-boarding is critical, nobody likes to face an empty spreadsheet and try to populate it without any context.

2. Re-budgeting is the name of the game. Unless you’ve been budgeting for a few months it’s very likely that your initial budgets are not going to be realistic. So we need to give you the right tools to adjust your budget to a more reasonable figure and stay on track again.

With all that in the mix we came to the idea of Targets. Targets are spending limits that you can impose to yourself, either for your global spending or per category. Once you’ve told Mondo that you don’t want to spend more than £100 a week eating out we’ll send you notifications and tips to keep you on track.

So this is how it works. A new button on the top left corner of the Spending section brings you to the Target control panel. Each control starts with your average spending so you have an initial reference and just a few taps are enough to adjust things.

Once you’ve defined your Targets the Spending screen will give you at a glance a view about how you are doing. We can imagine many users “living” in this screen instead of the Home.

As the time goes by and you get closer to your targets we will alert you with extra information in the notifications (iOS 10 and Android will have some extra love there) and an updated view. This is the kind of information that we’ll provide on future Notification Center widgets or apps for wearables.

Same idea if you hit your targets.

Even extra notifications if you are really blowing your targets.

Even though we still need to test it we think this solution may solve 80% of the problem with just a 20% of the complexity and we are really excited about it. Please ask us me any questions if you want to know more about how this works and, of course, every piece of feedback is welcome

4. What’s next?

Well, tons of things. Some of them we’ve already started to explore, others will require much more work. However, just to give you a bit of peace of mind these are some of the things that are on our radar. We don’t forget

1. The concept of “left today”. Some categories are more likely to allow daily decisions if you can know how much budget you have per day. We’re not solving that yet.

2. Savings and account segregation. If you remember one of the premises about budgets is that people like to budget to buy particular things. We will provide for that (jars and shared pots, etc.) and it will extend nicely the concept of Target.

3. A meaningful way to explore the future. Even though we’ll use colour to tell you how fast you are reaching your targets we don’t let you explicitly check how will your targets evolve based on your current patterns. We’ve made a few explorations around it but it’s still too complicated. We may revisit this at some point on a landscape (turn your phone to see graphs) mode or similar.

4. Categories need work

I think that’s all, we don’t have a strong plan yet but I’m sure we will start incorporating some of this elements really

Thanks!
Hugo

[anon95680666]

wow - so you haven’t just been playing with your VR headsets and BBQ ing all day

[tomsr]

Looks great! This is exactly what I’ve been after. Would be good to get hands on to give feedback. Any timescale on rolling out to alphas?

[terryharman (Terry)]

Looks awesome! I can’t wait to play with this as soon as it’s in TestFlight

[anon4562461]

OK, so now I actually want to be in on the TestFlight versions.

[Bob]

That looks fantastic! Can’t wait to start using this.

[Nim (Nim Anderson)]

This looks really awesome, definiately going to be useful features.

[billinghamj (James Billingham)]

Bear in mind it will probably be a good 3-4 weeks until this gets released, particularly as the targets thing is an actual backend functionality change, not just a visual change.

[anon4562461]

I’m not a TestFlight user anyway so I’ll be waiting much longer than that.

[Damien]

I want that budget functionality badly. This would turn the Mondo card form additional card to MAIN card. Gimme!

[Frankiejr (Frank)]

Some great updates @hugo and looking forward to using this. Though it will be far more useful when bills can go through the :mondo: account/card.

For the targets I would also expect the tracking bar to fill from left to right. If feels more natural. Also with spend this month I would expect to be left with left to spend on the right.

It is not clear in the designs how you would choose which which categories to target. Some are greyed out but not sure how to toggle them? Also do you have an option to disable the All Spending target but still enable a target on groceries?

At the bottom you can choose weekly, monthly or custom. Can these all be used at the same time? So a weekly target and a monthly target.

When you choose custom does this bring up options for what you want the custom timeline to be? For example 15th of every month, last Tuesday/third Wednesday etc. (Amazing how some paydates are created).
Also would this include things like 15th of every month unless a weekend/bank holiday in which case start on the previous working day?

At the moment the targets are for category but if you want to reduce spending on a specific purchase/retailer like Uber you may take take the train instead. These would both be under the transport category and not highlight the Uber target. It would be good to allow targets at retailer level.

Are you able to decline transactions that come under a specific category or specific retailer when a target is met? This could be a user option of a soft or hard target. Soft target you can be warned about but exceed. Hard target allows no further spending without a manual override.

[hugo (Hugo Cornejo)]

@SladdinCJ

but this won’t be possible with future, yet to be made transactions.

We plan two ways of doing that. One is that you will be able to tap and hold (you can see that working on Apple apps Health and Stocks, it works really nicely). The second way is that we will “ghost” transactions and events to come, for example, if you have a direct debit coming in a week you’ll see it in the graph (this is not going to happen until we’re a full bank, of course).

@SladdinCJ

The new header bar is also quite tall, so I’m wondering how you plan on using this as one scrolls down the transaction listing.

If we find that’s a problem we’ll give it a solution. For now we’ll go with a static header, compared with the current app the difference is exactly 1 transaction. Keep in mind that we don’t even use a NavBar on the Home screen so we’re already showing more content and less frame than many other apps,

@SladdinCJ

how often will budgets reset?

Not sure if we’ll have it on the first iterations but we’ll eventually let you define custom periods. In fact there’s a hidden detail pointing in that direction in the screenshots of this post. Can you find it?

@SladdinCJ

plans to introduce trip reports

Great timing! I think next week it’s going to kick-off the development of that. The second part of your question I think will need to wait until we explore jars/pots and Targets towards savings.

@SladdinCJ

Would it be possible for the bars to be coloured from the left hand end (so the colour reflects the money you’ve spent and the neutral grey the money you have left) rather than the current way around?

That’s actually how they work, filling from the right. I know it creates a bit of friction but it let us associate the spending numbers with the bar shape a bit better (all it’s aligned to the right). We’ll try it and iterate with users though.

[hugo (Hugo Cornejo)]

@Frankiejr

It is not clear in the designs how you would choose which which categories to target. Some are greyed out but not sure how to toggle them? Also do you have an option to disable the All Spending target but still enable a target on groceries?

You toggle them by pressing the buttons + or -, so yes, you can set a target for just one category or any combination of categories and total spending. I know the screen may look a bit confusing but it’s a solved problem, the moment you start interacting with it you’ll get how it works.

@Frankiejr

At the bottom you can choose weekly, monthly or custom. Can these all be used at the same time? So a weekly target and a monthly target.

Not for now, we want to keep it simple and check the basics work.

@Frankiejr

When you choose custom does this bring up options for what you want the custom timeline to be? For example 15th of every month, last Tuesday/third Wednesday etc. (Amazing how some paydates are created). Also would this include things like 15th of every month unless a weekend/bank holiday in which case start on the previous working day?

Ideally yes, in terms of UI that’s an old problem that you can see it’s been solved in any decent calendar app but I’m afraid many users wouldn’t even know when are they paid. At some point I hope we’ll be able to track it automatically based on your salary coming in.

@Frankiejr

At the moment the targets are for category but if you want to reduce spending on a specific purchase/retailer like Uber you may take take the train instead. These would both be under the transport category and not highlight the Uber target. It would be good to allow targets at retailer level.

We actually designed that, the problem is the overlapping with categories. If you budget £50 for Uber and £50 for Transport what should happen if you spend £50 on Hailo? Should we let you spend on Uber or not?

This kind of problem are very easy to understand for engineers but regular people tend to get really confused about it, so we want to keep it flat. Once we are comfortable with the basic mechanics we’ll explore more powerful stuff.

@Frankiejr

Are you able to decline transactions that come under a specific category or specific retailer when a target is met?

We thought about it. The problem that always come to my mind is, what happens if you go to a restaurant, you have a nice dinner and when the bill comes we decline the transaction because of a self-imposed target. What if you don’t have signal on your phone to go and quickly correct the Target? It would be terribly embarrassing.

For the time being we think notifications should be enough to inform you but the last call should always be yours, if you want to use your card we shouldn’t stop you

[hugo (Hugo Cornejo)]

Thanks a lot for the feedback and questions. Please keep it coming

[anon4562461]

@hugo

In fact there’s a hidden detail pointing in that direction in the screenshots of this post. Can you find it?

Screenshot labelled 013?

[Sam (Samuel Michael)]

True, it’s also important we get a healthy amount of user testing in before implementing updates like this

[Frankiejr (Frank)]

Thanks for the response @hugo.

With the toggle I am not sure I explained this correctly. I understand +/- will increase/decrease the target (and assume tapping the amount allows you to input a specific value). But how do you enable/disable a target? It’s this that does not seem clear.

[hugo (Hugo Cornejo)]

By default are all disabled, they get active the moment you interact with each of the categories. To reset there’s a button on the top left corner

[Frankiejr (Frank)]

Would it be better to have a disable per item option like a tick box or tapping the category name or something?

Reset would do the trick but you might need to reset everything just for one item you no longer want to target.

Promise that is my last question on targets until we get to use it in the app

Also think it is great that :mondo: are so open to interaction with its users. I really hope it continues

[hugo (Hugo Cornejo)]

Actually, one of the initial iterations had an independent reset per category that would appear after you modify the default amount on each category. However, for the time being I prefered to keep it simple.

I thought it was one of those cases where the trade-off of having total control vs the complexity of an “on/off” concept wasn’t probably worth it. Considering that this screen will be used just a few times a month I think it’s more important to make it really easy to use and predictable than over-design stuff to accommodate granular resets. Think about it like a TV remote, every numbered button lets you turn the TV on, but only one turns it off. Does that make sense?

We still need to test it though