Conducting a diary study for Monzo

Overview

Monzo had built a solid customer base with micro-businesses but wanted to extend their offering to small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). They asked us to conduct a diary study to understand the challenges that those responsible for a small business’ finances face and identify potential opportunities to better serve them.

Our insights helped to create new business opportunities and unlock a potential new market for the fintech company.

Research services

Survey

Diary study

The challenge

Uncover financial pain points and new opportunities

With Monzo aiming to break into the SMB market, our challenge was to help them gain an in-depth understanding of the common pain points SMBs experience in financial management and translate these into opportunities to extend their services to this audience.

Our approach

Creating a bespoke month long diary study

Highlights

20 participants
4 weeks of research
120 research sessions

Our bespoke diary study aimed to gather insights from a wide range of participants working in various business sizes, sectors and roles. We chose to run the study for one month to capture the full breadth of tasks in a businesses’ “typical financial cycle.”

To ensure smooth management of 20 participants across several weeks, we ran a test with a Fluent volunteer and set up pilot sessions that helped us refine our approach and questions before starting the full study. We also created a discussion guide, pre-interview survey and diary logs to facilitate interviews, before posting participants an invite with a personalised schedule.

Building a complete picture of the challenges businesses face

Outputs

Diary logs and visuals
Weekly team catch-ups
Insights pack including context, issues and opportunities

To start off, we conducted baseline interviews with participants and introduced them to the diary study format and materials. We then carried out weekly check-ins to discuss their diary logs, allowing us to probe into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of people’s ways of working and their challenges. We aimed to explore financial topics beyond just banking.

Each week, participants grew more comfortable and understood the type of feedback we were interested in. This enabled us to revisit previous issues, compare learnings from other sessions and discuss future opportunities. To conclude, we held a wrap up session with each participant.

We caught up weekly with the Monzo team to provide them with high-level findings and discuss emerging themes. This helped us to identify topics that needed further probing and new topics to investigate.

Outcomes

Greater understanding of a potential new market

The final study report we delivered offered rich insights into the contexts and key issues faced by SMBs in managing their finances. The outputs included contextual scenarios, participant quotes, examples of challenges contributing to their issues and opportunities for improvements discussed with participants, providing Monzo with a solid base of insight to break into this market.

New business and innovation opportunities

The findings were detailed enough for Monzo to share with other internal teams and give them a robust understanding of this audience’s challenges. From this evidence-based foundation, they could start developing and testing potential solutions with a view to include them in their future business offering.

A solid foundation for new products and features

Our insights helped to ensure that Monzo’s future products and features are evidence-based and customer-centric. Laying the foundation for an improved user experience that makes SMBs financial management tasks easier and more efficient.

Our thoughts

You build up really great connections with people over the course of a month, which makes interviewing enjoyable, different and somewhat more personal. It’s also nice to explore using research techniques that aren’t “testing” as it helps to build a greater understanding of research and how broad the field can be. I’m proud of what we delivered on this project and think we proved the value in picking the correct research approach for this context.

An Marien, Lead UX Researcher

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