Monzo Nailed the Start of The Savings Challenge (But Not the Middle)

It looks deceptively easy to build a challenge.

Just get the user to do a little bit more each day, and build a streak.

After a while, that creates a flywheel of motivation, right?

The Monzo 1p savings challenge exposes this problem perfectly, and so I talked to them about it. How did they motivate users to save for an entire year?

This case study looks at how to retain users during the most difficult (and often ignored) phase: the middle slump.

One area that Monzo could do better in, is what happens when you go to end the challenge.

The way I would approach this, is to think about the situation in which someone is giving up. There has likely been a trigger (e.g., run out of funds, needs the cash for something, feels stressed out by saving).

So the user loads the app, and clicks to end the challenge. Right now, Monzo shows a generic "are you sure" pop-up, for every user, regardless of how much progress they've made.

I'd predict that someone cancelling towards the end of a challenge needs the money, but quitting early on is more likely to be due to a lack of motivation.

A lot of the retention strategy for the "middle slump" will be reacting to signals—and attempting to quit is a very clear one.

Treating every exit as the same (with a generic pop-up), regardless of when it happened in the challenge, ignores all of this valuable context.

Here are some ideas you could try:

Or, they could suggest reducing the difficulty.

Losing a streak doesn't just hurt, it frames the challenge as something that you failed at.

I've written a whole Cheatsheet on habits, but this highlights one of the key limitations of a traditional "streak". They're motivating because people don't want to lose them, but that means that losing them is painful.

However, there is a moment before someone gives up, where you could offer an alternative: to make the challenge easier.

Except, they haven't (yet). 

If you go to quit a 4x challenge, it doesn't encourage you to move your current savings into an easier level.

In fact, it's essentially the same generic "are you sure" pop-up as the year before.

Quitting is often a result of a motivated user not being able to keep up with the expectations of their prior commitment—it doesn't mean they don't want to.

If the only options are to "keep going", or "give up", then the middle slump will continue to break people.