It’s been a while since we posted an update, and this will probably be our last one of these as we’re approaching the end of the project. So let’s take a moment to review our progress and our plan for final steps.
Journey
Initial Goals
Our goal for the new navigation was to restructure the app, with a few constraints:
- Create a new home for every existing feature in a structure that’s intuitive and easy to use
- Re-think our product abstractions so that our app scales beyond what we have today
- Make sure our 20 product teams continue working as effectively (ie don’t create a dependency on new nav)
- Don’t disrupt the experience for our users (ie the app shouldn’t be shuffling/breaking every week for existing users)
- Make sure our core business metrics don’t get worse in the new nav (ie adoption of features, retention, and a ton of other critical KPIs for the survival of the company).
Project Length
The project took slightly longer than we expected. Initially we aimed at delivering the new nav in 3/4 months, it took us 5 months. One of the things we got wrong was underestimating the scale of the project (classic Bruno). Even with ruthless prioritisation to keep the scope as narrow as possible, we had to touch on nearly every part of the app, so there’s an aspect of project size. And then there was also more technical complexity in doing some parts of this project. Things like the swiping gesture interaction is completely custom code, and the engineering effort to get these things right was a big challenge.
Scope
We purposefully left a few really important pieces outside of our scope. The two biggest ones are Budgeting and Payments.
For Budgeting, we really see it as a really important part of the Monzo experience, and we didn’t want to touch it as “just another thing”. It deserves having a team dedicated to that space to really get the experience right, so for now we just moved the entry point, to tackle it head on in the future. We want to make budgeting structural to the Monzo app, so instead of isolating it in its own space which today is Summary, we’re thinking of how it can be surfaced across the app so it touches your entire Monzo experience. Also very important for budgeting is making it work for everyone. I’ve said before here that everyone has a different mental model to think about their money - and it’s a super personal thing! So we need to be better at making these tools more nuanced instead of “full on” or “don’t use it”. It’s a really difficult problem space that we’ll work on in the future, no plans for now but we’ll keep you in the loop.
For Payments, we created a fair amount of work when restructuring the app. We know from user testing the payments experience doesn’t really fit in the new nav, and we have some ideas to making it better. But again it’s a big piece of work and we didn’t want to derail the new nav project. I appreciate your feedback on this, and we now have a good understanding of what’s not working for customers. I think for customers with only one account it’s kind of okay (not great), but it’s for customers with a Joint Account that the experience really shows its flaws. I don’t think this is a big of a priority as Budgeting.
Validation
This is something that’s been mentioned many times before in this forum, in our open office, and during Investival: the project kicked off from design principles and product vision, and we really needed to validate whether or not this was the right direction for app structure early on. It was something engrained in how the team worked, and we covered this in a few different ways:
- Early prototyping with production apps, our team was using it on their phones, then we gave it to all staff, then opened it to community members and a few thousand signed up for it.
- Your feedback here, and you wrote a bunch
- Staff feedback, we have a Slack channel for new nav feedback and got loads of feedback from everyone at Monzo (>1000 people!).
- A bunch of ad-hoc research/testing. Like going on the streets and asking people to use it on our phones to get reactions, calling customers that had used new nav before, focusing on different segments of customers, sending surveys, and a ton of other validation points.
- A/B testing experiments. We ran a few long running tests where we’d monitor a bunch of different important metrics in our team room dashboards. Nearly all of the metrics we tracked started worse off, and it was a great mechanism to keep us in check and work through the main problems one by one. These experiments are still running, and will continue for a bit longer.
- User testing with prototypes and production apps. This was something we did on a bi-weekly schedule. We got all sorts of different people through the door and ran proper lab testing sessions with people that had never heard of Monzo, random existing customers, and more specific user groups (ie customers with a Joint Account), with a mix of iOS/Android. We’d all sit in a room watching the live stream from the testing room and check what wasn’t working. The learnings in this would then be worked on from a Design/Eng perspective until the next lab session
State of the World
Current Apps
Our team self-imposed a deadline of the 30th August to finish all the things we deemed a blocker for the rollout. Good news, we met that deadline! This means everything we’ve done by that day was part of this week’s code freeze, and will hit the public stores ~Monday next week.
By any means, there are still a lot of things to improve in the new navigation! But we think the current version is already better than the previous app structure, so it makes sense to move all existing customers over to the new navigation.
Release Plan
The fact the apps are deemed “fit for release” doesn’t mean we do it immediately as it needs to make sense in the context of the entire company. Here’s the current plan for what will happen:
- 80% of new customers are already getting the new nav (up from 50%)
- We’ll start giving new nav to 100% of new customers soon.
- Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is currently being rolled out to customers and it’s a regulatory requirement across the banking industry. We don’t want to rollout new nav at the same time, so depending on SCA timelines we’ll adapt our plans for new nav rollout. Once SCA is cleared we can start rolling out new nav.
- There will be a big marketing push of the new navigation which is being branded as Monzo 3.0. This will be a bigger repositioning of Monzo as the best place to manage your entire financial life, and will bring in other things like Paid Early, Bill Pots, and a few other things.
- Our current pencilled date for new nav rollout starts on the week of 23 September, and rolling out will last 1 to 2 weeks. The marketing push will happen around the same time.
- At some point we’ll remove new navigation from Monzo Labs, which means once the rollout starts there’s no going back to old nav. If you want to go back in time for nostalgia sake do it soon!
- As someone mentioned, monzo.com now has designs from the new nav. We’re already updating all app images across channels (website, app stores, social media, etc). Keep in mind the majority of new customers already get the new nav.
All these things can change 
Fun fact: 330k customers are already using the new navigation. That’s 11% of all customers.
You can see below how many people started using new nav over time. The first people started using it in April, when we first started this thread! It looks like a steep curve, but it’s still a small number of people compared to the total user base. We see this as part of the experimentation phase, not the actual rollout that is yet to start
Accessibility
We’ve made the needed changes for bringing accessibility on par with the old navigation, this is a blocker for rolling out to customers that have accessibility features enabled. We haven’t tested this with users yet, so we’ll be doing that with some sessions in the office in the coming weeks. If there are no surprises and we validate our implementation we can start giving it to accessible customers after that.
Business Banking + US accounts
Right now these customers can’t get the new nav as there’s explicit code to prevent them being upgraded. Broadly speaking, there isn’t that much work required to make new nav compatible with these accounts (it kind of already works). These teams have a bunch of other things they’re working on, and until now, focusing on making new nav compatible would be a distraction. Now that the full rollout is approaching it makes sense for these teams to have a look at this and make the required changes. There’s no timeline for that, but it’s something that will come at some point.
Unboxing
You’ve already seen some of the designs for the unboxing experience from the latest app assets, so this is no surprise. Unboxing is the flow we’ll take existing customers through when we move them over to the new app structure. We’ll turn new nav on for everyone in the backend, and the next time a customer opens the app they see a 3 step full screen view. Each view has a short animation of the new navigation highlighting the key interactions of the new navigation.
The view can be dismissed without completing, and it will be accessible through a Carousel message, which can also be dismissed.
Kudos to @Aarti for creating these delightful animations for the unboxing 
That’s all! I’m sure lots of people here would’ve wanted feature x or y to be delivered as part of this project, but it’s not as if we’re going away (though admittedly most in the team are taking a holiday break after this!). The sooner new nav becomes available to all customers the sooner other teams at Monzo start working on this structure as a blank canvas. This will increase the speed at which we can deliver new experiences on Monzo, so there’s lots to be excited about! 
Thanks all 