BACK
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
CLIENT
Emburse
INDUSTRY
Financial Technology
PLATFORM(S)
DATES
Dec 2023 – Dec 2024
ENGAGEMENT TYPE
PROBLEM SPACE
SCOPE
Mobile, Wizards, Conversational AI
MEASURABLE
IMPACTS
20
70%
300%
Product Consolidation
At the start of 2024, our company had 11 apps in the iOS app store — all slightly different products belonging to brands that we owned but each had some overlapping functionality. Part of this project was born out of a need to consolidate our product offerings and move from a house of brands to a unified, branded house.
Feature Parity between Web & Mobile
Our legacy Chrome River app was mostly used for receipt capture and basic expensing, but it did not extend all of the same functionality that users had when using the web app. Our web app was built to be mobile responsive so there was a noticeable gap in functionality between platforms. As a stop-gap, this project involved building a mobile native app that could deliver a responsive web experience to the user.
Conceptualizing AI
I helped the mobile team explore UI patterns and UX interactions that would need to be built around a conversational AI, particularly the "connective tissue" of the experience that would help string the conversation together.
Redefining Brand Identity
The development of this app also involved a major rebranding and unification effort across our entire suite of products. I contributed to a multi-quarter design effort to audit, optimize, and execute a large-scale realignment of brand across the company.
Refined mobile flows
We spent extra time dissecting our existing forms in our web app and found opportunities to make the flows more focused and streamlined on single tasks at a time.
Maintained a unique design system
Although we already had the Embark Design System available to us, there wasn't enough built out in that system that catered to mobile-specific design. This is because following the 2020 merger, we had not worked on new mobile apps and all of our mobile offerings were maintained separately in whatever legacy tech stacks they used. To solve for this, the easiest thing was to create a new mobile design system that could be maintained by the mobile team and eventually merged into Embark.
Branding & Accessibility
Only a few of our legacy products placed a serious focus on accessibility, so from the outset we made the decision to rebrand Emburse Enterprise with accessibility at the core. This included selecting a color palette that would somewhat match the legacy colors but also remain accessible based on today's standards while also thinking ahead to future accessibility policies coming in the next few years.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, we leveraged Radix as a starting point and made our own modifications. The result was a good set of colors that could map to our legacy palette while maintaining visually integrity for all users.
Finding a starting point
As a company that worked with user data around expenses and travel, there was already a large dataset of insights upon which to potentially train an AI model. We did not have enough budget to fully scope out a generative AI so the company instead allowed us to build a prototype of a conversational AI.
Creating a logical flow
I built out visualizations of what each type of conversation could look like and identified what possible configurations or dialogs would need to exist to make realistic conversations occur.
Product Relaunch
The Emburse Enterprise mobile app launched to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in January 2025, following several months in development. By performing the rebranding and merging the web app with a native mobile app, we were able to increase speed and efficiency for our users by providing a more consistent user experience.