Why doesn't Monzo use a voting system for user ideas?

Feedback & Ideas
#1

Hi Team :wave:

I am sure there is a very logical reason for this, but I was wondering why Monzo doesn’t use the discourse voting plugin within the ideas and feedback section of the community?

It adds additional functionality so users can vote for ideas posted to that specific community category, making it easier to understand which ideas are most in demand.

I was just wondering what Monzos reasons were for not using this feature? I thought that maybe Monzo isn’t aware that this plugin exists, however my thinking is that if they use some of the other plugins like flairs, then they must know about the voting plugin. Just curious.

image

https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-voting/40121

4 Likes
We've turned on voting for Feedback/Ideas
#2

If we voted on features then we’d expect Monzo to work on the highest voted features first, which is probably a terrible idea.

10 Likes
#3

Voting has been enabled on the bugs boards recently I believe.

I’d be more reticent to roll it out further because the ability to vote will come with an expectation of action based on votes which isn’t where I’d want to go.

7 Likes
#4

The problem is then people have an expectation about what will come first, when in reality there are hundreds of decisions that feed into when products get released. For example, hundreds of us were asking for Apple Pay for a long time, but Monzo were held back by the processes of Apple, so no matter how many upvotes it got, it wasn’t going to come more quickly. Then there are issues like skill sets of the current staff, other product dependencies, some stuff can’t be worked on until other items are done or updated etc. Much simpler to let the experts take feedback but work out priorities themselves. Good ideas posted on this forum are always fed in to the decision makers.

7 Likes
#5

Overall, perhaps because voting requires a commitment on Monzo’s side to actually act on the most popular things. And given there is a need to build financial stability, the balance has to remain with Monzo as a business.

I like the idea of this for some features though but the larger more complex ones would inevitably lead to more votes on the specific features and that gets messy (I looked into something similar myself).

So votes for “BIG FEATURE X” I think are workable, but votes for “Function 314 of Feature Y” is almost impossible to manage.

4 Likes
#6

Oooooof, a great idea in theory, but it would be a train wreck.

Monzo already have a plan in place for most things - Just look at the plus accounts where it went from “Hey everyone, we are a million years away from this, but we’d love your input”, and then a week later we saw it being tested with insurance partnerships (which takes months to organise) and other bits and pieces.

I’d much rather Monzo do what they feel is best, rather than asking the users (especially the 1% on the community) what they’d like.

There are already huge expectations on Monzo due to the “transparency” line which is used a lot, and whenever people feel they fall short on it (for whatever reason), people get the hump.

This would be 10 times worse IMO…

5 Likes
#7

The problem with voting on the forums now is that if there is 10,000 people who use this community, why don’t the other 1.5 million Monzo users also get a voice? Any future voting system about features needs to be built within the app.

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#8

the-homer-inline4

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#9

Referendums! NO NO NO

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#10

Thanks for the quick responses, it all makes perfect sense, so thanks :+1: .

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#11

What is the purpose of using the Voting Plugin on the bugs section?

#12

Hopefully it means “I can reproduce this on my device”. Number of users affected is one of many aspects considered when prioritising bug fixes.

9 Likes
#13

As @Tulloch stated above I believe.