I applaud their effort, but I find some of the directions taken somewhat disturbing.
I think having the option to double check late night purchases is cool, but shouldn't be so strongly framed as being aimed at bipolar individuals. I wonder how much "drunk dialing" online shopping also occurs in the middle of the night.
But I would be really weirded out by getting messages prompted by a missed paycheck. If I am living paycheck to paycheck, my first missed paycheck is a dire problem and it won't be solved by trying to budget better. That income needs to be replaced, and it is not my bank's job to address that. Not at all.
This is amazing. One of my friends group was diagnosed as manic depressive recently. They quit their job, and have major issues with spending hundreds of pounds at a time on random cool gear. This would be a very useful tool to help them make those impulses less damaging.
> This was all achieved without hindering the experience for those using the pills for medical reasons.
FWIW, I suffer from pain in the same joints of my hands, and blister packs exacerbate it. That's not to say that switching to blister packs for general use isn't a good thing, just that it isn't a universal positive.
> An example I regularly consider is the UK’s 1998 redesign of Tylenol pill packaging.
Seems like a strange way for a UK bank to phrase this - AFAIK, the Tylenol brand has never been used in the UK.
I wonder if they chose to say “Tylenol” because the brand name is better known to an American audience than either generic name (paracetamol and acetaminophen)? It's strange to read as someone from the UK, though, because here we use the generic name (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmd9HUkOQHk). Especially since, as you point out, they are a UK bank.
Personally, that combined with “the UK's” confused me, because why would the UK government be changing the packaging of a specific brand… do they mean that the Tylenol manufacturers changed their UK packaging? Turns out, though, that the UK legislated to change the packaging of paracetamol products (http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f403).
This is fantastic to see. It's a shame that more thought doesn't go into the accessibility of apps/services in the context of mental health. It's even more of a shame some of the comments here imply companies shouldn't bother.
I think UX in the context of mental health problems doesn't get nearly enough thought or effort put into it at the moment, and Monzo deserve a lot of recognition for what they are trying to do.
> First product that comes to mind is facebook and their gender selection.
Personally I could care less as to what gender identifier you would want to be designated as. But I'm sure that the Facebook management would issue much apologies for causing you such mental distress. Besides, I understand that once you register, Facebook allows for a custom gender designation:
No product is going to cure people of anything and certainly no commercial company has that kind of capability.
I read the line you quoted as saying designers and developers should build things in ways that don't make life worse. We can't "cure people", but we can make their lives better by considering their needs. This is true for everyone, but especially more vulnerable people.
Taking Monzo as an example, they make it very easy to freeze your card if you lose by enabling a user to do it via their app. And they enable a user to unfreeze their card if they find it again. Other banks make you telephone a call centre, go through automated menus, and speak to someone to cancel the card and then you have to wait days (or weeks..) to get a new one. Someone who has lost their bank card is already likely to be anxious, so Monzo have made their life a little better. It's good that they think about these things rather than just copying the other banks.
>No product is going to cure people of anything and certainly no commercial company has that kind of capability.
And so of course we should not try to build software that takes vulnerability into account? Just because you cannot cure something doesn't mean you cannot help.
I applaud Monzo for this effort, they continue to prove that moving to them was a good choice.
