I’ve discussed the possibility of a potentially redesigned transaction feed several times over the past few months in various different threads. Inspired by @Peter_G’s suggestion to start a dedicated thread to discuss this stuff, I’ve gone ahead and made that thread!
I’ll first of all start with why I think we’re due an update to the layout of the feed.
Over the past year or so Monzo has been gradually updating the look and feel of the app. One tab at a time. Monzo has never (I don’t think) had a consistent design language across every aspect of their app, and this endeavour has for the first time unified their design language across the entire app bringing greater coherence. There are a lot of benefits to this. Greater usability, greater accessibility, easier to maintain, fewer unique assets, less code.
Dark mode. Having a unified and coherent design language that’s reused throughout the entire app with fewer or no unique elements makes designing, building, and testing a feature like dark mode much easier. It drastically simplifies what can otherwise be a very arduous and painstakingly long process. A coherent design language makes designing and building the interface for new features easier too! Because most of the work is already done and can simply be reused.
This journey began (I believe) with the introduction of the best version of Monzo Plus and the Plus tab. Every element within every sub page of that tab, and every feature (like making and managing virtual cards) of Monzo Plus launched with the new UI first shown here:
This continued with the overhauled payments tab here:
And this is also when we first saw a sneak peek at a dark mode, which was shown off using the new UI here:
This new design language has since rolled out to other parts of the app. Help has been updated with the interface. The list view of your accounts that you swipe down from the home tab to access has been updated. The settings page, the add money page, the pots creation and edit pages all updated with the new UI. The recently added manage tab, and virtual cards pot linking all have the new interface too. Transactions have the new design (though feel unfinished). Trends has the new design. And summary just acquired it with the new testflight release today.
This leaves one major omission that has so far remained untouched. The feed. Will they update the design of the feed? If they do, what will it look like?
I think they will update the feed. And as for what it looks like, I think we can take cues from how the rest of the app has been updated and draw assumptions from that. Monzo are not the only company adopting this modern look though. Many others are too, including other banks, and I think a quick look at their feeds may give us an insight into how the Monzo feed may look too.
Here’s Revolut’s feed as an example.
And another example from @Alexxxxx here:
If the feed does receive a design upgrade, what then will this mean for the card pane at the top, and the carousel in general? This new UI is significantly less dense, so saving as much space above the feed as possible will be important. Perhaps we’ll see the carousel retire in favour of the swipe down list. And have a more condensed header like what exists on the trends tab here:
The swiping left/right for navigating between pots and accounts wouldn’t even need to go away either. They could implement it so that you could instead swipe anywhere on the feed to go left or right to the next account/pot. Similar to how Zen and Cash App work.
I have a lot of speculative thoughts on this and could arguably type for much longer and go much more in depth. But I’m curious to read the thoughts of others, so I’ll leave it here for now with a few questions to close.
- Do you think the feed will be redesigned in line with the rest of the app?
- Do you think it needs redesigning in line with the rest of the app?
- What do you think of the new design language in general?
- How do you feel about this approach to rolling out a new design? Would you have preferred a design overhaul for the whole app to drop at once, or do you prefer the one tab at a time approach that they’ve taken here?
