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