Monzo · 2023

A little friction.
More control.

Helping customers put a boundary between an impulse and a purchase—on their own terms.

Senior Product Designer2 weeks · 1 engineeriOS & Android
The outcome ↓
Support without judgement
Spending Block introduction explaining how to block individual merchants
A customer's own reminder is shown before they choose to keep or remove a block
Shipped in Monzo Labs

A small release.
A practical way to take control.

10,000+customers adopted Spending Block
2 weeksto design, develop and launch
1 engineera focused first release

Adoption comes from the project retrospective. It doesn’t measure reduced financial harm.

01 / Find a useful place to start

Start with the people.
Then decide what to build.

We started with no defined solution. I ran lightning talks and a workshop with vulnerability specialists, designers and researchers.

We turned the evidence into opportunities, then chose what we could act on.

The workshop I facilitated: source → facts → insights → opportunities → a shared focus.
The design question

How could we help people interrupt unwanted spending, while keeping the choice in their hands?

02 / Give customers the choice

Their boundary.
Their decision.

Customers chose which merchants to block. We never said a purchase was wrong.

Sharing a reason was optional.

Start with what a block can and cannot do.
03 / A pause in their own words

A reminder from
present you to future you.

During setup, customers could write themselves a reminder. If they tried to unblock the merchant later, we showed them their own words.

The product creates a moment to reconsider. The customer stays in control.

Set an intention.
Revisit it before unblocking.
The delivery decision

A useful first step.
Honest about its limits.

With one engineer and two weeks, we chose a first release with clear limits.

Specific merchants, not whole categories

Inconsistent merchant categorisation ruled out reliable category-wide blocks.

Card payments, not every way to pay

Bank-transfer restrictions needed support-team intervention.

A reminder, without a cooldown

Time-based blocks and a delay before unblocking were outside the first release.