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The trick we use to make research findings memorable at Monzo

8/1/2021

Research is an important part of how we build things at Monzo. It’s our mission to make money work for everyone, and the only way we can do that is by understanding people’s wants and needs. Researchers typically work in product teams that are made of different professions, from designers, product managers and software engineers, to writers, marketers and business analysts. And all these different people might have a different level of understanding of the problem space they’re working in. In this post we’ll explain how we make the things we learn through research memorable for everyone who works here.

Presenting findings can be challenging

We humans tend not to accept new information as easily if we weren’t involved in finding it out.
When we hear something new, we tend to think we knew it all along. We also assume everyone else thinks like us. This makes the researcher’s job a tricky one. And it’s made harder by the fact that many people expect new user research to tell them something they didn’t already know

You can ask people upfront what they expect to happen

User Experience Design expert Jared Spool wrote about his favourite trick he uses to avoid the “we knew it already” scenario. He asks people, especially senior executives, what they’re expecting to see or happen before the research begins.

What makes this method so effective is it reveals people’s existing knowledge, especially when you do it as a group. It also avoids people needing to try to appear smart in front of their colleagues.

The trick we use to make research findings stick

At Monzo, we use another trick. The technique is a simple true or false game. Here’s how it works:

the researchers structure their report around the key findings. They then present these as “fact or fiction”, “true or false” or an equivalent.
in the room, you give everyone a way to provide their opinion and turn the debrief into a game. This can be done using post-its (green for true and pink for false, for example), or via a blind voting system (like Kahoot), or any other means.
the researcher presents a finding from the research and asks the room to show their opinion. So with post-its for example, to hold up the appropriate colour or to vote if you’re using a game.
people can see the results around the room and discuss the finding or insight as a team.

It's especially useful for exploratory or generative debriefs

We’ve found this technique works especially well when presenting findings or insight from early-stage research — also known as exploratory, generative or discovery-stage research — rather than evaluative research.

Early-stage research is focused on learning about people’s behaviours, goal, motivations and attitudes, and the context in which those happen to understand a problem space.

Evaluative research is focused on testing how well a solution meets someone’s needs.

Exploratory research tends to be more time-intensive, so people who aren’t researchers don’t tend to spend as much time getting involved.

Because we don't accept new information as easily if we weren't involved

When people aren’t heavily involved in research, they don't tend to internalise or fully understand the knowledge as well as people who take part in either collecting it or analysing it. It’s a symptom of a cognitive bias called the empathy gap.

It’s one of the reasons that research needs to be a team sport, because it’s not as useful or impactful when it happens in a vacuum outside of the team and you share it later.

We also tend to think we knew things all along

Another important cognitive bias relevant to people making decisions based on research is hindsight bias.

Hindsight bias happens when someone learns about an event and believes that they knew it was going to happen before it did. It’s also known as the “knew-it-all-along” phenomenon.
A cousin of the hindsight bias is the overconfidence bias, which suggests that a person’s confidence in their judgements is greater than the objective accuracy of those judgements.

And we think that everyone thinks like us

We tend to overestimate the extent to which our own beliefs, preferences and habits are typical of those around us — it’s called the false-consensus bias.

What that means is, we’re more likely to think that others have the same knowledge that we do, when they don’t. We might think that other people think the same way and make the same conclusions we do, when it’s not true.

People think that research has to tell them something new

Some people have an expectation that they’ll attend a debrief and learn a new fact or nugget that will shock them. Sometimes this happens, but sometimes it doesn’t.
So you might come out of a debrief one day and think “we knew that already”. Or as a researcher, you might hear someone say that to you. Don’t worry, that’s not the point of research. It’s a bonus if it happens.

Research is about making better decisions as a team

The point of research isn’t to teach you something new. The point of research is to be more certain about our product decisions, so that we can create something useful and valuable for the people using it.

You shouldn’t come out of a debrief shocked. You should come out with clarity. After discussing the research results, the team should have more confidence about the direction of the product, and a set of actions or next steps.

Our trick makes debriefs a memorable, engaging experience

Rather than being a passive debrief where people can become disengaged, this technique lets everyone play an active role by engaging with the information.

We’ve found that teams tend to better remember the information — there might be a shock factor after all — and they realise that their peers might not have the same knowledge, perceptions or level of understanding as they do.

It’s unlikely for a team to correctly guess all of the answers, and if they do, they can rest assured as to their confidence and clarity. And the value of debriefs is in the team discussion, which inevitably happens in this process.

Originally published on Monzo.com on 9th January 2020.

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Seven things I learnt scaling research (and design) at Monzo

6/11/2020

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Three years ago, I joined Monzo as the first user researcher in the Design team. We were just five people and autonomous product squads hadn’t yet been formed. There were about 120 people in the whole company and we had around 400k customers on a prepaid card. It felt like being on a roller coaster rolling out of the station and picking up speed. A few weeks later, we started migrating all our customers to the banking app we’d just built, unlocked a new round of investor funding and hit hypergrowth. At our peak, we were on-boarding between 40-50 new people a week. The roller coaster was at full throttle.

Since then, we re-architected the fundamental structure and the navigation of the app, created a savings accounts marketplace, offered overdrafts, loans, an energy switching service and the ability to get paid your salary a day early. We built Joint Accounts, Business Accounts, launched two Paid-For propositions, and entered the US. We also built most of our internal tooling, including the customer support and payments platforms amongst others. We grew exponentially, peaking at about 1500 people with 25 in Design – including 6 researchers and a single hero in a Research Ops role. What a wild ride it’s been, and it’s not over yet. Here are some of the things I’ve learnt along the way.

1. Educating other teams and people about the role of Research & Design is an important and ongoing part of your role

It surprised me how many people hadn’t worked with researchers or designers before Monzo. Or perhaps they had, but the way they’d done so previously was different. Setting expectations and helping your peers understand how you can create value is something you have to continuously do. The more proactive you are at doing this, the better. If you don’t explicitly define your role, others will make assumptions about what you do and how to engage with you – or not.

Screenshot of Research presenting a segment at the company All-hands, explaining more about who we are and how we work.Picture

Presenting at the company all-hands

2. Getting executive buy-in is crucial

The most senior Design and Research representative in an organisation needs to continuously champion the work the team is doing and help the business leverage our unique skill set. That person needs to have a deep understanding of Design and Research as tools within the context of the business to be able to do that. Without a strong representative and sponsor, the team’s value risks being misunderstood or worse, become invisible. The team should help give visibility to their sponsor of the great work that’s happening, so they can be better champions.

3. Documenting timeless insight to a high standard is worth the time investment

Good quality documentation of valuable timeless insight is referred to and shared time and time again. Find the medium and channel that works for your company and invest in it – it might be slide decks, written reports, illustrated storyboards, summary videos, or something entirely different. It can be tempting to skip over creating documentation at the time decisions are made because things move fast, but don’t fall into that trap. It ends up hurting you in the long-run. Visual or written documentation creates a source of truth which people can align around and come back to, to reset. It can create momentum and galvanise teams. If it’s well executed and high value, it can become part of your team’s new joiners’ onboarding.

Screenshot of Borrowing-related research documentation, supported by Greig Cranfield

Borrowing-related research knowledge hub.

4. Spending time with your colleagues talking about research insights becomes more important the bigger you grow

And that’s because there are more people who might find the insights useful, and it’s easier for people to miss out the larger the group becomes. Contextualising research findings so your peers understand how it applies to them is one of the most powerful ways to influence change. It’s the first step in bringing people along the journey with you and going in the same direction. As the company grows, researchers should spend almost as much time documenting and putting it in front of the necessary people as they spend doing the research itself.

5. To have impact, focus on outcomes, not individual artefacts or responsibilities

Avoid defining your role by your deliverables. Instead focus on your team and company goals, and what you need to do to make progress towards those. This might mean flexing the shape of your role. As a researcher or designer, you might need to take on what you deem Product responsibilities at times to move the team forward, depending on who else you’re working with. There is natural overlap between the skill sets, especially during the early, problem-definition stage.
As a researcher, you might need to organise a Design Sprint if you can see it’s the right time to. As a designer, you should have a strong view of what the roadmap should look like. View these moments as opportunities to lead, and in doing so build trust and relationships that will enable you to have more impact in the long-run. Take ownership for the progress and outputs of your team, rather than passively waiting to do just your part.

Illustration of people fitting large puzzle pieces together

6. Designing a mass-market financial product that is deeply useful and personal for every customer is challenging

That’s because money and finances are incredibly individual. The typical place to start with innovation is by solving the problems that you hear the most – the ones most people have. Once you’ve tackled those, the next step is to understand the more nuanced needs of particular groups of people. Deciding how to prioritise between those whilst maintaining a coherent product experience can be difficult, especially when people’s needs are so different. You have to be very clear who you’re designing for and why they’re a priority.

7. Designing to meet a need isn't always enough

Some learnings you might find useful if you’re scaling

In the space of 3 years, I’ve learnt more than I could’ve hoped for, even if it was hard to appreciate at times. I’ve had the chance of working with some of the brightest, most ambitious, passionate and caring people I’ve crossed paths with. I learnt many more lessons from scaling outside of Design and Research – please get in touch if you found these useful and would like to hear more.

Originally published on Monzo.com on 6th November 2020.

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Why everyone at Monzo does research

3/6/2019

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We’re growing the user research practice at Monzo so every product team has support from a researcher. But we’re growing so fast that it’s a challenge to hire and onboard new joiners quick enough. Instead of pausing projects while we wait for new researchers, everyone working on the Monzo app is encouraged to do their own research if they don’t have a dedicated user researcher.
This might sound like blasphemy to other researchers. So we wanted to explain the reasoning behind it.
The main argument against everyone doing research is that people who aren’t trained in it won’t do it right. They might ask the wrong questions, ask leading questions (ones that encourage someone to answer in a certain way), make assumptions based on biases, involve the wrong people in the research or draw incorrect conclusions from a flawed set of data.

Alternative research practices and what’s wrong with them

In a fast-moving tech company like Monzo, this practice leads to a better set of overall outcomes for customers and the business than the alternatives.
The other options are:

1. Research is centralised and exclusively run by a small group of specialists

Although this scenario produces the highest quality research, what usually happens is that research is seen as a checkbox exercise rather than an essential part of the process.
Research becomes a blocker rather than an enabler, and ends up being skipped under the pretext of lack of time or involved late in the process. That can lead to bulldozing at best or shipping a feature with a terrible user experience at worst. If research is mandated, it becomes a bottleneck and slows down shipping, which can lead to a company losing its competitive advantage.

2. Research doesn’t happen at all and decisions are made based on instinct

In this scenario, decisions are generally left to the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) in the room. User research is often misunderstood and the myth that “Steve Jobs didn’t do research” has inspired lots of product managers to build things based on their instinct alone.
The success of a solution is dependent on certain factors — how it solves a problem, how it’s presented to people and how it fits with their lives. When you do no research at all, you assume that everyone’s needs, problems and lives are the same as yours. Even if you build quickly and test to iterate fast, you still run the risk of missing the mark entirely with the direction you’re shooting in the first place. The higher the risk to the customer and the business, and the more complex the problem you’re trying to solve, the more research you should do to understand the underlying needs, problems, context to gauge whether your solution will work.

3. Research happens haphazardly by people with varying levels of training in disconnected pockets — nobody owns it

In this scenario, new knowledge lights up like a candle somewhere in the company. Once someone leaves, that light leaves with them. Insight dies and research is often repeated by teams and people who don’t know what’s been done in the past. The quality of the research is extremely varied because no one specialises in it, or has the time to do it properly.

When everyone is involved in research, everyone is closer to the customer

The problem of “what if they do it wrong?” is an easier problem for Monzo to solve because of our lean, experimental approach to product development. We seek feedback from our customers as soon as we release a new feature — and often before we’ve released anything — and iterate changes quickly. Most importantly, we’re not afraid to scrap features that don’t work.
Teams at Monzo who do research, tend to:

Empathise better with people’s problems and get excited about them
Create new conversations about what they have heard or seen
Focus on the problems we’re solving rather getting attached to a solution
Move with more direction and alignmen

We train everyone working on the app with the basics

We run two hour training workshops for anyone working on the app e.g. product designers, product managers, writers, marketers, engineers. The workshop touches on cognitive psychology and its relevance to user research, the difference between research questions and interview questions, and finishes with an overview of the research toolkit, plus a game of “good question/bad question”.
The purpose of the workshop isn’t to transform non-researchers into user researchers. The workshop has three main objectives:

To help non-researchers understand the common thinking patterns and why they matter
Understand the range of research methods available and what they’re useful for
Recognise what good and bad research looks like

The analogy we use in the workshop is that doing research is like DIY. It seems easy enough and everyone should be able to do it. But there are different levels of mastery and things can go very wrong. As the old adage goes, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. If all you know is surveys and focus groups, you’ll try to apply those to every problem you see. By improving the general understanding of what best practice research looks like, non-researchers at Monzo learn that there’s a lot more than just a hammer at your disposal. They also learn to spot when they should do their own research versus when to bring in someone else to look at the problem.

We also support our peers in other ways

The user research team run hour-long drop-in clinics twice a week, so any employee (we call them Monzonauts) running their own research can get advice at any stage of the project they’re working on. Since we started the initiative last year, we’ve helped teams across the company from internal to international projects. Doing this also gives us visibility of the projects happening so we can populate the findings in our centralised research database.
We also have a #user-research channel in Slack (our internal messaging tool), where we share articles and findings from projects, and anyone can get help. We’re currently in the process of putting together a DIY kit with templates for email reach-outs and phone calls.

It means the researchers can focus on chunkier projects

A common concern I hear from researchers when I tell them our approach is that their value is being undermined, because part of their role is being done by someone not specialising in it. I understand where this concern comes from, but I don’t think it’s something to be worried about. Once people start doing research, they realise how time intensive it is and how easily it can go wrong — just like DIY.
By giving people at Monzo the right tools and guidance, and showing them what ‘great’ looks like, they can quickly understand whether they’ll learn what they need themselves or whether they need help. More often than not, this means asking researchers for help, especially during the discovery phase of a project. Empowering everyone to do their own research also means that researchers can focus on early-stage research rather than optimisation-research and feedback.

Three phases of research: discovery, design & build and optimisation. Each phase tends to have research methods which are best suited to answer the types of research questions.

It means we can achieve our mission sooner

We’ve made it our mission to make money work for everyone and we need to release products to do that. We have to be pragmatic and accept that it’s often better to deliver an imperfect solution sooner than to do research for the sake of doing research, and risk falling behind our competitors.

Originally published on 3rd June 2019 on Monzo.com

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The tool we use to turn around user research findings fast at Monzo

11/2/2019

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As we grow as a company and more and more people start using Monzo, user research becomes even more important. We need to run sessions frequently and use our findings to inform product decisions, so we keep meeting the growing, changing needs of our customers.
To help us do that, we’ve come up with a method that let us quickly turn around results from evaluative user research.
As we grow as a company and more and more people start using Monzo, user research becomes even more important. We need to run sessions frequently and use our findings to inform product decisions, so we keep meeting the growing, changing needs of our customers.
To help us do that, we’ve come up with a method that let us quickly turn around results from evaluative user research.

We use a behavioural analysis matrix

One of the most important principles we follow with user research at Monzo is to focus on what people do and not on what they say. That’s because people’s opinions can change all the time and be dependent on someone’s mood, an article they recently read or even who they’re speaking to. Behaviours, on the other hand, tend to be fairly consistent unless something disruptive happens in someone’s environment.
To make sure that our evaluative user research focuses on behaviours and not opinions, our researchers put together an analysis matrix ahead of the session.

The analysis matrix outlines specific assumptions that we want to test in the design, like whether people tap on a particular element, whether they’re able to find a feature, or whether they organically express any concerns about content.
We choose the assumptions that form the backbone of the matrix collaboratively with the entire team of product designers, product managers and engineers.

Centre assumptions on behaviours, not perceptions

If we’ve made our assumption correctly, we should be able to see the user behaving in a way that objectively shows us our assumption was either right or wrong.
User research is about reducing uncertainty in the design process, so getting this right is important or the sessions can create more confusion or end up being a waste of time.
If we need to ask a user questions to understand what they’re thinking, we’re asking them to share their perceptions and opinions. And because opinions can be so changeable, this introduces subjectivity and inconsistency. If we phrase the assumption ambiguously, it leaves room for uncertainty and doesn’t give us a clear picture of what happened.
For example, if we’re researching the sign-up journey in the app. A well-phrased assumption would be:
✅ “Users will get through sign-up with no major issues”
This is an effective assumption because it

Sets clear boundaries about what we want to understand
Focusses on what the user does, not what they say or think

Another assumption we might want to test in the same sign-up flow might be:
✅ “Users will frame their passport correctly”
Again, there’s very little room in the assumption for ambiguity.

A less useful assumption would be phrased like:
🚫 “Users understood how to open an account”
This assumption is subjective and open to interpretation.

For example, someone might be able to objectively tap through the flow and complete the sign-up process but might not realise that their account is open. We would need to ask them whether they understood that their account is open, which would be leading them in the questioning and might not be true.

Create focus and minimise bias

We run a handful of 45-minute one-to-one sessions during a full day of evaluative user research, with 15-minute gaps between them for the team to run through the analysis matrix and discuss what we saw. We take it in turns to lead the discussion for each of the assumptions and we come to a consensus.
The advantage of using the matrix is that it makes the purpose of the evaluative research extremely explicit and defines the boundaries of what we’ll test in the designs. It also gives focus to sessions later in the day, when everyone starts getting tired and are more likely to miss things that happened. Without the matrix, team members observing can be influenced by their biases and pick up primarily on things they feel are particularly relevant and overlook other, important things. The matrix reduces the role of bias while giving space for other findings to emerge. Any other relevant observations and pertinent quotes are captured in spreadsheet, which everyone observing contributes to during the session.

Align the team and uncover areas for improvement

Because at Monzo the whole team watches the research sessions and we analyse the results collaboratively in almost real-time, there’s no need for the classic lengthy analysis period during which the researcher has to labouriously plough through reams of post-its or notes by themselves.
The morning following the research, the researcher transposes the analysis matrix to our internal wiki (we use Notion) and pulls out additional key findings from the notes. In the afternoon, the whole team gets together and we playback through the findings and work out what we do next. Having the expertise and context of the entire team in the room — the product designer, product manager and the engineers — means the plans are holistic and viable rather than limited to the lens of one of the roles, which we feel leads to the best outcome for our customers and the business.
Once the team has agreed on the outcomes, the researcher finished the write-up on Notion. That includes:

The method we followed
The research questions
Links to the stimulus
The user profiles
The analysis matrix
Any additional findings
The outcomes of the research

We include a summary at the top of the page, and share it on Slack with all the teams at Monzo that might be interested in the findings. That can be any of our numerous product teams, our marketing team or even the executive committee.
Sometimes findings from the research point to simple, easy solutions which the same team will quickly build or iterate. Sometimes they point to entirely new problems which will create a whole new project for a different team in the future.

Reduce the risks that come with shipping fast to learn

There’s a level of risk involved when dealing with people’s money, and we recognise we need to be careful that we don’t ship something that damages our customers trust. At the same time, the best way for us to learn how to solve customer problems is to ship fast so we understand how features work in the wild, for different people. This method allows us to learn before shipping and make sure that we can be more responsible with the design decisions we make.

Originally published at monzo.com on February 11, 2019.

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Understanding how young people manage their money

7/8/2018

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We want to make money work for everyone, and that includes teenagers who might be managing their money for the first time. Last year we announced that we’ve made Monzo available to 16–17 year olds!
As we prepared to bring accounts to younger people, we spent some time over the last few months talking to teenagers. We spoke to some 16–18 year olds — and their parents — to try to understand how they think about and manage their money, and what we can do to help!
Here’s a few things we learnt, and how we’re thinking about using it to make Monzo better for younger people.

Managing your money for the first time can be daunting because everything is new

Many of the teenagers we spoke to told us they didn’t feel confident managing their money. They often put things off altogether until they urgently needed to do things, at which point they felt stressed or under pressure. They generally looked to their parents for advice first because they trusted them and felt reassured they would be able to give them informed advice.

One teenager had an account with a legacy bank, but had never logged-in or used it properly because the card reader needed to access it online confused her and setting up mobile banking was a nightmare. She also wanted to open a savings account but didn’t know where to start. Because she found it overwhelming and confusing, she just hadn’t started using digital tools to start saving yet. She put cash aside in a physical place, but recognised it wasn’t the most secure or efficient way of saving.

One young adult said he’d opened an account with the same bank as the rest of his family so that “in case anything goes wrong, they’ll know how it all works.”. Another told us that he preferred to talk through new things with someone in a branch who could explain things in detail and help make sure he “didn’t mess things up.”.
Takeaway 1: Because many of the teenagers we spoke to still looked to their parents for knowledge and advice about their money, we need to think about how we communicate with parents as they play a very important role in helping their children choose and open a bank account.

Takeaway 2: Opening a new bank account is a good opportunity for teenagers to learn about different banking products and features. Onboarding experiences should clearly help people understand what’s available to them at the right time, so they can understand how it works and fits in with their lives.

A bank account means independence, but there are lots of unknown unknowns

Young adults talked about the freedom that an account gives them, because it’s often associated with getting their first serious job and earning their own money. But many didn’t know much about the kinds of products and services available to them or the terminology associated with banking.

There’s a lot of information to take in when you’re learning something new for the first time, and it can be difficult to make sense of abstract concepts until you see them in practice. Most of the young adults we spoke to told us that they didn’t find any terms confusing, but couldn’t tell us what things like overdrafts or APRs were.
And whilst some young adults feel comfortable asking for help about things they don’t know, some told us that branches were ‘intimidating’ because they wouldn’t know what to ask.

Takeaway 3: We tend to focus our communications around Monzo features, and emphasise how they compare with other banks. But that won’t mean much to teenagers who don’t have a frame of reference yet. We need to explore different ways to communicate the benefits of Monzo.

Takeaway 4: People can use Monzo easily through the app, and our tone of voice is clear and friendly. This experience might be more appealing to younger people who might need more time to digest new information, especially if they don’t feel confident or knowledgeable enough to ask someone in person.

Parents need help teaching their children how to budget and save

The parents we talked to told us that it can tricky enough to stay on top of their own spending, let alone giving their children advice on how to budget. They were also concerned about their teens learning to save money for a rainy day and not spending money as soon as it came in.
Most teens we spoke to had previously saved up for a few months for larger purchases but hadn’t thought about saving long-term. It was something they felt they would do once they started earning a regular salary and were more independent.
We found parents were worried that their teenagers don’t get regular enough updates about their balance, and one parent worried that the monthly statements sent by legacy banks weren’t frequent enough. The young adults we spoke to also complained about the delay between their spending and their balance updating in their accounts, so they don’t always have a true reflection of their available balance.

Takeaway 5: When they’re looking to give their teens guidance on how to keep track of their money, parents might find Monzo’s real-time notifications and instant balance updates reassuring, whilst teens might find these helpful in managing their spending.

Takeaway 6: Our existing customers tell us how useful Pots are to help them budget and save because they can associate Pots with specific goals and easily move money across to them. Being able to visually separate their money and put it towards specific items might be particularly compelling to young adults in thinking about the long-term.

Bill splitting can be tricky for teens and cash keeps things simple

Splitting the bill can be a complicated task anyway, but we found it can be particularly hard for teens. Some of the teenagers we spoke to didn’t have bank cards because their parents gave them cash to spend. Those who did have a card still tend to use cash to pay in groups anyway because it makes it easier to settle up.
In groups where everyone has a card, it’s rare that someone will have enough money in their account to pay the whole bill and wait for friends to pay them back. Most 18-year olds we spoke to hadn’t yet done a bank transfer to a friend or family member because of the hassle involved of setting up payees with legacy banks, so generally paid friends back in cash.

Takeaway 7: Teenagers need a better bill-splitting experience, especially for large bills and big groups. We should find out how we can make splitting the bill easier for young people using money with friends.

Takeaway 8: Peer-to-peer payments are particularly easy with Monzo compared to legacy banks and with features like ‘Nearby friends’, you can pay people without having them in your contacts list. These features might be particularly useful for young adults when they’re out and about with new friends.

Teens prefer having the money in their accounts than carrying cash because they're more likely to spend cash

Similarly to a lot of adults, teenagers find carrying cash inconvenient and they told us that having cash to hand meant they were more likely to spend it.

Most of the teenagers we spoke to had done small jobs and been paid cash for these, which they generally kept in their room. They didn’t feel comfortable with more than £80-£100 of cash and wanted to be able to pay it into a bank.
Unlike their parents, who would budget by taking out a fixed amount of cash and not spending more, most of the teens we spoke to felt like cash was unaccounted money, and they were more likely to spend it than if it was in their account. This might have been because these teens didn’t have separate savings, so their account was seen as somewhere to store cash, rather than spend it all.

Takeaway 9: Depending on how much money people have, they may want to use Monzo in different ways. Some might see it as a place to budget their money, whilst others see it as a place to store their discretionary spend. We need to cater to these different use cases.

We recently made it possible for every Monzo customer to deposit cash in their account, including 16–17 year olds! If you’re a teenager that’s giving Monzo a try, we’d love to hear what you think. Share your thoughts with us on the community forum and we’ll use them to try and give younger people a better start to their financial lives!

Originally published at monzo.com on August 7, 2018.

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Understanding our users at Monzo

2/2/2018

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Our mission at Monzo is to make banking better for one billion people, and a large part of achieving that involves solving existing problems. When we started out almost three years ago, we began by identifying all the pain points customers encounter when dealing with their traditional banks, and designing features to eliminate them.
But as we move forward, we want to go beyond just solving the existing problems brought about by legacy banks’ archaic systems, and meet more latent needs as well. The best functions or features are the ones that remove obstacles you didn’t even know were there!

Understanding hidden needs

To identify and understand different people’s hidden needs, we carry out qualitative and quantitative research. This gives us rich insights into the way that people use and manage their money, which we in turn use to inform and prioritise our product roadmaps.
Put simply, research helps us make sure we’re building the right features in the right way, for the right customers. I joined the team in November 2017 as User Research Lead, to help our Design and Product teams gather these insights and use them to make more informed decisions.

Communication and consistency

The first thing I found was a typical organisational problem: there were pockets of research knowledge hidden within the company, or kept in individual’s heads. When a company is small, this isn’t an issue: knowledge is shared easily in company-wide conversations. However, as the product increases in complexity and the company grows, it becomes more tricky. If insights aren’t captured and shared, we risk duplicating our efforts. At best, this wastes a lot of time, but at worst means we could miss important nuggets of insight altogether and end up making decisions based on misinformed hunches.
Second, there was also a lack of consistency in the way research was being carried out at Monzo. It was only being run on an ad-hoc basis, with self-selecting Monzo customers who were early adopters that mostly worked in tech. If you conduct user testing with such a specific type of customer, there is a huge risk that the findings may not be representative of our customer base as a whole.
The results from testing weren’t captured as a rule, and when they were it wasn’t in a format that would allow for easy reproducibility. We need to be able to reproduce research sessions so that we can re-test features after we’ve iterated on the designs. It allows us to understand the effect of any changes we’ve made, positive or otherwise.
User testing needs to be done on a regular basis with the right audience, depending on what we’re testing. For example, there’s no point in testing overdrafts with customers who will never need or want one.
As our customer base expands and becomes more diverse, it’s important that we follow suit. We must make sure our research processes help us reach an audience that really reflects the makeup of our existing and potential user base.

Testing Tuesdays

To solve some of these problems, I introduced Testing Tuesdays: all-day user testing sessions which we run every few weeks. We invite a number of people into our offices for one-to-one sessions, where we ask them to complete tasks on a clickable prototype or test build of the Monzo app.
In the run-up to a testing session, I work with our Product and Design teams to agree on the features we’ll be focussing on, and outline a handful of hypotheses that we use the sessions to test. For example, we might hypothesise that “Users will be able to create a pot,” or “Users will be able to make a bank transfer.”
On the day, I sit with each of our participants in turn, and ask them to carry out certain tasks on a prototype of the app.
People from the Product and Design teams (and anyone else who’s interested) watch from a separate observation room. After each session, we discuss the test hypotheses and come to a consensus on whether the results were positive, negative or inconclusive.
It’s important that we watch what people actually do with the prototype, rather than listening solely to what they say. What people say about a product is often different to how they behave, and our goal is to understand how they actually interact and use Monzo.
Watching the sessions in real-time means everyone is on the same page, and allows us to act on the results immediately. Running the sessions on Tuesdays means we can run follow-up pop-up (‘guerilla’) tests later in the week once we’ve iterated. We learn fast, and adapt faster.

User interviews

User interviews are one of many qualitative research techniques we can use. They’re quick and easy to run, but they don’t give us the full picture. A short conversation with someone over the phone can’t help us fully understand how Monzo might fit into the broader context of their money and their life.
One of my goals is to grow a team at Monzo which will give us more bandwidth to take on bigger projects, where we spend time with people in their day-to-day lives, understanding their pain points and identifying their latent needs. We call this process exploratory research, and it’s invaluable when trying to build a product that really makes an impact on people’s lives.

Exploratory interviews

As well as the insight we gather from user interviews and testing, we have a fountain of feedback that comes in each day through in-app chat conversations and the community forum.
Our next priority will be to find a way to share and store the feedback we receive through different channels, in one central place. We want to make feedback easier for us to analyse and prioritise, so we can ensure we’re addressing the biggest needs that impact the most people, rather than serving a minority that might be shouting the loudest.
All of the user research we do at Monzo is in service of the same goal: to make sure we’re building the best bank for our customers ❤️
If you’d like to get involved and haven’t already, please join the discussion on our community forum. We’d love to hear your feedback, and learn more about how you use Monzo and manage your money.

Originally published at monzo.com on February 2, 2018.

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A collection of thoughts, observations and practical tips and techniques that have helped me make sense of things

The trick we use to make research findings memorable at Monzo

Presenting findings can be challenging

​You can ask people upfront what they expect to happen

​The trick we use to make research findings stick

​It's especially useful for exploratory or generative debriefs

Because we don't accept new information as easily if we weren't involved

We also tend to think we knew things all along

And we think that everyone thinks like us

People think that research has to tell them something new

Research is about making better decisions as a team

Our trick makes debriefs a memorable, engaging experience

Seven things I learnt scaling research (and design) at Monzo

1. Educating other teams and people about the role of Research & Design is an important and ongoing part of your role

​2. Getting executive buy-in is crucial

3. Documenting timeless insight to a high standard is worth the time investment

​4. Spending time with your colleagues talking about research insights becomes more important the bigger you grow

5. To have impact, focus on outcomes, not individual artefacts or responsibilities

​6. Designing a mass-market financial product that is deeply useful and personal for every customer is challenging

7. Designing to meet a need isn't always enough

Some learnings you might find useful if you’re scaling

Why everyone at Monzo does research

Alternative research practices and what’s wrong with them

1. Research is centralised and exclusively run by a small group of specialists

2. Research doesn’t happen at all and decisions are made based on instinct

3. Research happens haphazardly by people with varying levels of training in disconnected pockets — nobody owns it

When everyone is involved in research, everyone is closer to the customer

We train everyone working on the app with the basics

We also support our peers in other ways

​It means the researchers can focus on chunkier projects

It means we can achieve our mission sooner

The tool we use to turn around user research findings fast at Monzo

​We use a behavioural analysis matrix

​Centre assumptions on behaviours, not perceptions

Create focus and minimise bias

​Align the team and uncover areas for improvement

​Reduce the risks that come with shipping fast to learn

Understanding how young people manage their money

​Managing your money for the first time can be daunting because everything is new

​A bank account means independence, but there are lots of unknown unknowns

​Parents need help teaching their children how to budget and save

​Bill splitting can be tricky for teens and cash keeps things simple

​Teens prefer having the money in their accounts than carrying cash because they're more likely to spend cash

Understanding our users at Monzo

​Understanding hidden needs

Communication and consistency

Testing Tuesdays

User interviews

​Exploratory interviews

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Categories

You can ask people upfront what they expect to happen

The trick we use to make research findings stick

It's especially useful for exploratory or generative debriefs

2. Getting executive buy-in is crucial

4. Spending time with your colleagues talking about research insights becomes more important the bigger you grow

6. Designing a mass-market financial product that is deeply useful and personal for every customer is challenging

It means the researchers can focus on chunkier projects

We use a behavioural analysis matrix

Centre assumptions on behaviours, not perceptions

Align the team and uncover areas for improvement

Reduce the risks that come with shipping fast to learn

Managing your money for the first time can be daunting because everything is new

A bank account means independence, but there are lots of unknown unknowns

Parents need help teaching their children how to budget and save

Bill splitting can be tricky for teens and cash keeps things simple

Teens prefer having the money in their accounts than carrying cash because they're more likely to spend cash

Understanding hidden needs

Exploratory interviews