Goals 2.0: progress that actually feels like progress

Goals in version one were a number, a date, and a progress bar. They worked, but they were a little joyless — and they didn't account for the fact that life happens in the middle of any meaningful goal. We rebuilt the whole feature this quarter. Here is what changed and why.

The problem with a single progress bar

The old goal view answered one question: am I on track? That sounds useful, until you realize the answer is almost always either "yes, barely" or "no, slightly". Both feel the same emotionally — vaguely guilty — and neither tells you what to do next.

Worse, a progress bar with a single line treats every contribution the same. The £200 you put in during a normal month and the £200 you scraped together during a hard month look identical, which is technically accurate and emotionally wrong.

We wanted goals to feel like the thing they actually are: a relationship between you, a number, and the months you live through to get there.

What's new

Projection bands. Every goal now shows three trajectories — pessimistic, expected, and optimistic — based on your contribution history and current pace. The bands widen the further out you look, because honesty matters more than precision. You can see at a glance not just am I on track, but how much margin do I have if a tough month happens.

Visual milestones. Each goal now has automatic milestones — every 25% by default, customizable per goal. Hitting one shows a small celebration in the app and an optional notification. We tested several versions of this and the muted, one-line celebration consistently outperformed bigger animations. People wanted acknowledgment, not confetti.

Gentle nudges, not guilt nudges. If you fall behind on a goal, the old version showed a red bar. The new version shows the projection band shifting and offers three concrete options: extend the deadline, lower the target, or set up a small recurring contribution to catch back up. Each option shows the math in plain numbers. We removed every red color and every exclamation mark from the goal view. They were never useful.

Pause without losing history. You can now pause a goal for a defined period — one month, three months, until a date — and it stops counting against your projection. When the pause ends, the goal resumes with the original target intact. This is for the realistic case where you need to redirect cash to something urgent and don't want to feel like you "broke" the goal.

Joint goals. Goals can now be shared between two accounts, with each contributor's portion shown separately. This was the most-requested feature for the last two quarters, and the version that shipped is more careful than the one we initially designed: contributions and balances are visible to both partners, but neither can edit the other's transactions. The line between transparency and overreach is something we are taking seriously.

What we removed

We removed the leaderboard. The old goals view had a comparison element — you are saving faster than 60% of users with similar income — and our research consistently showed it made people feel worse, not more motivated. Money is not a competition, and we should not have built it like one.

We also removed the daily streak counter for goal contributions. Streaks are a great mechanic for habits where the daily action is the point. For goals, where the daily action is largely automated, a broken streak just punished people for not topping up an already-on-track goal. It went.

Migration

Existing goals migrated automatically when you next opened the app. Nothing was lost — projection bands were back-filled from your contribution history, and milestones default to 25% increments. If you customized anything in v1, those settings carry over.

If a goal got off track during the migration window and you want to reset its projection baseline, there is a one-time Recalibrate button in each goal's settings. It takes the current balance as the new starting point and re-projects forward. Use it once per goal at most.

What's next

The next iteration of goals is about grouping. Most people we talked to don't have one goal — they have a constellation: an emergency fund, a holiday, a car repair fund, a "I might want to take three months off in 2028" fund. A future update will let you see them as a portfolio: total monthly contribution required, prioritization, and what happens if you redirect contributions between them.

That's later this year. For now, open the goals view, take a look at the projection bands on your existing goals, and tell us how it feels. The goals view has its own feedback button. We read every note.

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