Building a Mobile App from 0 → 1

This wasn't a redesign so much as a rebuild, and I hadn't worked on a mobile product at this scale before. This app was going to reach millions of Canadians, and that changes how you approach almost every decision, from navigation down to how much you can afford to guess versus validate.

• —Set an information architecture that could grow with the product
• —Build accessibility in from the start, working directly with an accessibility expert
• —Design a UX process that actually fit inside an agile workflow
• —Learn to work fluently with both iOS and Android developers
• —Coordinate with an offshore development team across time zones and priorities
• —Ship a baseline MVP that gave the team room to build more complex features later

I worked closely with research to establish the design principles the app would be built around, validating navigation, information architecture, and specific experiences before they got locked in. That included a competitive study of how other Canadian and US benefits and finance apps solved similar problems, which shaped what we borrowed, what we deliberately avoided, and where we had room to differentiate. At this scale, a wrong assumption is expensive to unwind later, so research helped us catch that early instead of after launch.

Given how many people would eventually use this app, accessibility couldn't be an afterthought. I worked directly with an accessibility expert to make it part of the process from the start, not a review that happened right before ship.

Part of this project involved working with an offshore development team, which came with its own set of challenges, mainly making sure the vision behind our decisions actually came through clearly and not just the decisions themselves. Getting that alignment right across internal teams and an external partner took as much communication as it did design.

Shipping the app was never going to be the finish line. I worked with the Qualtrics platform to build an active, in-app feedback module that asked members the right question at the right moment, right after they finished submitting a claim, for example, instead of a generic survey interrupting them at a random point in their session. That context was the difference between a prompt people dismissed and one people actually answered.

Those responses fed into a UX Qualtrics dashboard the team used to sort and triage issues, turning scattered feedback into something we could actually prioritize against the roadmap instead of anecdotes floating around in separate inboxes.

As we got close to launch, I took the initiative to figure out what actually needed to happen to get the app out the door. That meant working with the motion and visual design teams on the launch experience, SEO and marketing on how the app would be found, engineering on assets for the Apple App Store, Google Play, and the iPad App Store, and content writers on release notes that actually sounded like they were written for a person. A lot of it was just coordination: making sure the right people had what they needed at the right time.

This was a baseline MVP, so it's hard to point to one single feature as the highlight. What I found genuinely exciting was the challenge underneath all of it: how do you rebuild something at scale and actually make it better? The strategy and principles I set at the start are still what the team uses today as they build more complex features and make the app more feature rich, and usage has kept climbing steadily since launch.

#1

Top Finance app on the Apple App Store, November 2024, up from where the previous app ranked.

50K+

app visits every day, and still growing.