Our approach to the redesign.

Our mission at Brex is to empower employees to make better financial decisions no matter where they are. Core to executing on that promise is delivering a modern mobile experience designed to help people manage their spending and related tasks with ease and efficiency. Earlier this year, we launched a new Brex mobile app. Not only did we add more functionality, we completely reimagined the entire app experience to make it faster, more intuitive, and as easy as possible for customers to use Brex on the go.

I wanted to share a bit about our approach to redesigning the app and three tenets that guided our efforts: start with the customer, sweat the details, and speed up internal teams.

1. Always start with the customer.

To kick off our app redesign, it was essential to evaluate the existing mobile experience. Most of what we built was based on customer feedback and our pursuit of making their lives easier. We sifted through App Store reviews, interviewed many Brex customers, and gathered internal feedback to determine the areas that required improvement.

Themes ranged from discovery of features, navigating the app, and friction related to the previous app’s UI. Through customer feedback, we also delved deep into understanding the primary jobs that Brex customers needed to accomplish while on the go. We prioritized features and actions that were relevant to those primary jobs, making sure they were front and center on each mobile screen. This approach also became the basis of the app’s information architecture and tab bar: Wallet, Inbox, and Trips (more on that below).

2. Sweat the details.

We spent several design cycles evaluating the details on every piece of mobile UI to ensure it accomplishes the goals and actions a Brex user might need to take. After synthesizing the customer research above, the design team met daily for the first month in the quarter to explore options for every UI component, and we stress-tested those options against needs uncovered through the research. We needed to be confident that the design of the interface elements were in service of helping our customers get things done quickly and efficiently.

Today’s customers expect a modern, intuitive experience — so both usability and brand delight were top of mind for us. As we stress-tested the options, we narrowed down on a set of new components that became the foundation to our new mobile design system. Overall, we improved typography to increase contrast and readability, redesigned UI components to improve usability, refreshed interactions for better wayfinding, improved our color system to better denote purpose, and reimagined our critical flows and app navigation.

3. Help internal Brex teams move fast.

One other goal of the redesign was to empower internal teams to design and build mobile features faster. Previously, before standardizing the set of foundational mobile UI components, each team had to build their own set, which slowed them down and caused inconsistencies in the app. By providing teams with a new and standardized design system, they are able to iterate much quicker, enabling them to bring new features and improvements to customers faster as well.

Overcoming challenges by embodying our company values.

At Brex, we have a federated mobile team, which means that teams executing on the mobile experience are split across a few teams. This model enables us to move fast as each team is a domain expert in their respective product areas. However, one challenge we needed to overcome was the coordination of efforts to design and build this new app in one sweep. The risk of not doing so would have resulted in more inconsistencies where some parts of the app get the new design and other parts lag behind.

One of our company values is One Brex, where we “focus on what unites us and optimize for Brex above any individual and leverage the collective genius.” We were able to embody this value by getting buy-in from partners across the company by creating a “v-team” to prioritize and tackle the app redesign. This team was composed of design and engineering resources from multiple product teams, enabling us to coordinate efforts to redesign and build an entirely new app from the ground up within a quarter.

Now, let's take a look at the new Brex app, along with some of the functionality we added based on our research and design system outlined above: