One of the feedbacks for Fold said, “…every feature in the app feels intentional…”. While I had read and heard people calling Fold well designed, a departure from that general statement towards someone calling Fold intentional, felt nice.
I have seen it with people too and with rooms. Well kept cupboards and workstations, put together in a way that doesn’t feel probabilistic. An itch to carry things beyond the limit of utilitarianism, that’s something very human. When we call our pets by names, and not “cat” or “dog”, that’s human.
Every cuckoo’s nest looks the same, but each room where the resider has spent time arranging it feels different. The angle at which the light is, the brightness of it, a chair near it. The same coloured books adored on a row of a bookshelf, that’s human, that’s intention. A big part of design is intention. When on a summer morning you pick out a white linen pant and a beige relaxed t-shirt, pair it with white sneakers, then when you receive a compliment after someone notices it, it feels nice. So it felt nice when someone noticed something beyond the surface, behind the colour palettes and font choices, noticed our intention to make something nice. Thank you.
This blog post is to give you updates about the new things we have built, introduce them to you, and thank you for your continual interest in our project. Every time there was a rise in interest, we thought it was the last time. We were advised to be careful, “you’re riding a tide and the excitement will be lost, milk it!”
But as much as noticing excitement from others makes us happy the only excitement that matters for us is ours. Are we still excited to build Fold? That excitement dwarfs every rush of adrenaline that comes from a new review or an appreciation tweet, and for better or worse, that excitement is still very much present.
In the recent update to our iOS app we have shipped things that firmly lays the foundation for newer features to arrive on the platform. We’re calling the first one Transaction Groups.
Transaction Groups
From the first day there was no doubt in our minds that the product we’re building, is for a very subjective problem. The solutions that came before us lacked a respect for that subjectiveness, which is more or less why there is still a gaping hole looking for someone to come fix it.
Making adding metadata to transactions easier is where we started. Close to 200 custom icons were designed, especially for the tagging feature, and all that work has paid off. Tagging transactions on Fold is delightful, easy and straightforward. But it still wasn’t enough. A perfect solution, or an almost perfect solution was still out of reach, which was very plainly evident from the new icon requests that we received almost on a daily basis. This is where Transaction Groups comes in.
Going on a trip? Monthly expenses for your apartment? Trying to curb your expenses on online shopping, or cigarettes? Transactions can now be put into groups, then tracked and analysed. To make it easier to reach the most urgent groups they can be pinned right below the search bar.
We’re excited to see how people will use Groups, the possibilities are endless. Moreover, what would be interesting to see is hopefully a decline in the number of icon requests.
Transaction Groups is available on iOS v1.5.0 and Android v0.9.10.
Tracking Refunds
When we asked ourselves what value does allowing to track refunds bring, the answer was simple: peace of mind. Between the time you hand off a package for return, and the money hitting your account, there is a state of limbo where you don’t have the money or, the item you purchased.
Use Fold as a paracetamol for that time, just turn the refundable toggle on, we’ll track the refund and notify you as soon as the refund hits your account.
For already refunded expenses you can link the two transactions together, for added context.
Both of these features (Transaction Groups & Refund Tracking) are in their early stages. We see Transaction Groups growing into something we can easily introduce budgeting into. Tracking refunds right now is only possible for online merchants, and only in scenarios where the whole amount is refunded. We will eventually also allow tracking refunds from your friends and family, which will include handling the complexity of refunds transferred in tranches over a certain period of time.
It’s very important again, that we are intentional as we slowly introduce new and essential features. Our team is grateful to have this exquisite opportunity to build something for the country on top of the exceptional Account Aggregator framework. If we’re not careful, we may just end up bloating the app with features. The careful slow rollouts of features might appear illogical to some, like Filtering Transactions which is only planned after two releases.
It’s not laziness, it’s being careful with the opportunity, it’s intention. And sometimes someone just ends up noticing it and mentioning it in a review, and that always feels nice.