UX Bites #4 — Monzo, Instagram & more...

Hey 👋,

You know what I love about UX Bites?

There’s now so many (often hunted by my readers), that I can stumble across something in the feed and have a moment of “oh I forgot about that, that’s really cool”.

I use it like Pintrest, but for UX (instead of house renovations that I’ll never be able to pull off, because I’m terrible at DIY * ).

Anyway, here are the most popular Bites from the last few weeks:

1. Wait, you can’t afford that!

Monzo will automatically identify recurring payments (such as direct debits), and notify you a day in advance if it looks like you won't have enough money to cover them.

2. Don’t worry, it’s still pasting

If the process of pasting something into Figma takes longer than a second, you'll see this message.

This is designed to keep you waiting (without panic-clicking somewhere), and reassure you that it's not frozen.

To be clear, most of the time on other apps you’d see either a spinner, or nothing at all (while the page goes unresponsive).

3. Refreshing carousels

If you've seen the first slide of a carousel on Instagram, but not swiped through the rest, then when you refresh your feed, it'll automatically refocus on an unseen slide.

This is a subtle way of making the feed content feel new, by recycling content you haven't seen within the same post.

4. Secret console message

Inspecting the console tab on Soundcloud will show a secret prompt to join their dev team.

Psst: I’ve been trying to find more of these Web Inspector easter eggs. If you know of any, please email me.

5. We’re going undergrroooound

On Citymapper’s IOS app, if you scroll to the end of the page, and then forcibly keep scrolling, you'll find an underground illustration easter egg.

Was 5 not enough? There’s a growing archive of them right here:

Or, email me a Bite you’ve found.

That’s all for this week. ✌️

Seeing as you got this far, it really helps for deliverability if you reply to this message. (It tells your inbox that you like me, or something to that effect).

- Peter

* I tried repainting my garden office over the weekend, and I spent more time fixing the problems that I went on to create, than I did painting. It’s patchy, uneven and now my patio tiles look like a Damien Hirst. Yes, my wife is angry.