The Gummy Bears

TBH I’m really not impressed with this stuff.
There’s clearly a negative sentiment building up in the pro users group (especially the paying ones).

I understand that free service = you are the product, so ads, data sharing and everything. But with a paid, premium product (I’m asking a certain Emma founder) please don’t argue that you know what UX works better for us. I’m paying for pro features but I’m also expecting a reduced (ideally, non-existent) level of nuisance to come with that.

I understand gamification to a certain extent, as long as it’s (still) fun. But when gamification turns into a pressure towards users to grow your product for you, it becomes annoying and kills said fun. I’m all up for spreading the word when I get the chance - as you’re doing a good job in general - but please don’t put this in my face. Let me decide if I want gunmy bears and cross-selling and what not, and if I don’t (and I’m paying you for it) just let me use the core product without the gimmicks please. Give me the option and let me be happy on my terms.

Not meaning to sound patronising but I’m only going on this rant because I do want to stay with you. But user loyalty is difficult to get and easy to lose. There are other similar apps (most of them free and less intrusive) and if the friction turns greater than the percieved value your growth can easily go negative.

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This is cute.

Yeah - we are going to test the bottom + a shorter amount on the screen.

It’s currently at 5 seconds, we are going down to 3.

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As others are saying, I think it’s still a bit intrusive, especially if using the app to edit a few transactions in one go. Just showing ‘+1’ does the job IMO! You mentioned swipe gesture but doesn’t seem to do anything for me on iOS

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I agree that the balance is not quite right yet, but it has only been out for a day or so! It’s just not that easy to achieve in development, so it will take user input to find the right solution.

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No but see it’s not only about the gummy bears. The prominent button at the top of my feed, which changes colour and moves down when I scroll, as if it were an important feature (you could mistakenly assume it for a “new transaction” button) when all it does is share the app - not helping me at all. If I wanted to share the app surely I’ll find it in the settings sheet. Oh but it’s been there already!

It’s also about the save money tab which others have been moaning about already, which sits in the most prominent position in the bottom bar. And includes the gummy bears as well - rewards. But the rewards are in the more page too. How’s this great UX when the same non-essential features are all over, while something essential like the transaction feed takes two taps (one of which is a small hard to tap text link).

I’m a bit bummed because in the past few months all the development I could see in Emma was around growth (rewards, partners, gummy bears) rather than around improving the product.

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Our only KPI at Emma is growth. If there is no growth, there is no Emma. :wink:

Nonetheless, we are working to bring some cool features (https://twitter.com/emma_finance/status/1276428127451971585) in the next few weeks and we haven’t stopped working. :stuck_out_tongue:

You can also understand that in the middle of a pandemic when every other company is laying off and the economy is crashing - our priorities have to change (slightly).

ps: As of today, the priority is to improve budgeting, subscriptions and add search + a few more Open Banking banks for the UK market. We have been wanting to build Gummy Bears for 15 months and Save Money tab for 24 months, but were just waiting for the right time to do it.

Other than this, we track everything and retention leads to growth, so we have no intention to churn users. The interesting argument about this is that the Save Money tab is leading to better retention, because we offer more value as a product/service/app.

In the same way, Gummy Bears will lead to even greater retention because they incentivise users to take action.

I have been personally/emotionally involved in Emma for the past 4 years and trust me if we didn’t know what we were up to - things like this (Emma, the personal finance tracker, scores $2.5M seed led by Connect Ventures | TechCrunch) wouldn’t happen.

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Point taken but I think you’re mostly talking about retention of non-paying users. I think that you have two different user markets here. Paying users arguably have better financial education (typical UKPF/MSE audience) and appreciate Emma for the technical budgeting, rather than for the more basic FE features. As someone else mentioned earlier, your paying users already know how to “save money” in equal or better ways than offered by Emma, so the feature has no added value for them.

I think you’re in a catch-22 here. You’re focusing on growth primarily by targetting basic financial education. This will get you lots of free users, but how well you can monetise that free user-base? Do you make enough money on third party commissions compared to paid users recurring revenue? Is your end game not converting users to paid? In which case, should you not assume that once they graduate beyond basic FE they would rather prefer a cleaner product?

Cards on the table - in my case MoneyHub was the product I wanted (clear business model - no ads, no cross-selling, doesn’t sell my data); but their UX was so sub-par it just didn’t fit my bill. I thought I could get that as a paid user from Emma, but it sounds like that’s not the model you have in mind.

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Lots of great opinions in this thread :+1: but we have to recognise that we, as Emma users, will always have mostly subjective opinions. Only @edoardomoreni and the Emma team have the data behind these decisions and I appreciate their openness here in discussing their reasoning behind those decisions.

As users (maybe more so as Pro users), we may prefer an alternative UX, but the chances are whatever Emma does - like whatever any company does - is not going to please everyone. What strikes me is how passionate we are about the App that we take the time to air these thoughts and discuss without descending into uncivil conversations, which I’ve seen happen on some other forums.

As Apps add more features, it becomes harder and harder to organise the UX in a way that pleases everyone - just look at the community backlash from Revolut and Bunq’s last updates.

There is a balance with any product between adding value to the customer, and adding value to the business, and taking the risks has to be driven by the data.

I still think that Emma has the best bank coverage and features to make it the best Money Management tool for me (and I have MoneyDashboard, Cleo, Yolt, Lumio, Snoop, Revolut…) and whilst I also may like to be able to turn off some features that are not relevant to me (or after completing actions), I’m not about to cancel my Pro subscription because of what is for me (IMHO) a minor inconvenience. Particularly if Emma continues to go in the right direction with their mission and growth. I recognise that may not be the same thoughts of everyone using the App.

Have a good weekend all.

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I’m sure you’ve already seen it, but I hope Emma builds Search similar to how Monzo do it.

They have a Search bar that holds previous search history and it’s built to use natural language. They also have icons which trigger the relevant input options, e.g. click on categories icon and you see a list of the available categories to choose to add to your search, or you get the relevant input method for that option, like a date carousel, or number keypad for amounts. You can easily add more criteria to narrow down the search, and it’s all updated realtime.

Replicating that capability for Emma would be fantastic.

“Good artists copy great artists steal”. :wink:

The search has been discussed here. I actually had Monzo in mind as well, but I thought it wouldn’t be nice to make it so explicit :smirk:

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Let’s move here -> Transaction Search.

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