Paylocity Expense

Product Design
UX research

2016-2019

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Situation

Paylocity had a very successful expense management app, but it was limited to desktop. I was a part of a two-person team that would be responsible for bringing the product to the Paylocity mobile app as a 0 to 1 project.

Tasks

I was part of a two-person team that needed to bring this project from concept to reality in the Paylocity mobile app. We were responsible for the initial strategy, roadmapping, research & analytics, and final designs.

Actions

Even though the workflows were established on the desktop version of expense, we wanted to operate without bias and treat this like a true 0 to 1 project. We had faith that the mobile-first mindset that we were taking would have upstream effects to the desktop app. So we hit the road on this project with the goal of creating the best expense management product in our competitive space.

Conducted stakeholder interviews — We were already in a deep, collaborative relationship with our product team. So we set frequent workshops & other engagements around finding all of the problems that needed to be solved.
Performed competitive analysis — We weren't the first to the expense management mobile app space. So we wanted to see what types of steps our competitors were taking.
Guerilla user research— We didn't have a budget for user research, so we built a scalable prototype & launched some qualitative guerilla research with friends & family, as well as some participants and coffee shops & co-working spaces.
Engineered user flows — The data drove us to create a "choose your own adventure" workflow that would allow for different types of use cases when it came to expense management, which we discovered to be a reality very quickly in our research.
Design system contributions — We had to create new design tokens based on some of the unique flows inside of our expense management app, including map-based mileage, as well as some expansions to data cards.
Final Designs — We delivered final designs to the development team, and managed the process as the designs became a reality.

Results

The Paylocity Expense designs as shown, existed in the Paylocity product suite until 2025. This was a total of 8 years of nominal changes based on design system updates. Paired with the rate of growth in the Paylocity Expense Management, it shows a clear reality that a deep, collaborative, multi-faceted design process yields work that can last for years with very little managment.

The following are results from 2018-2025

User Rate

+ 833% (1,500-14,000)

Discovery & Design Strategy

A Good Process makes for a long shelf life.

As of July of 2025, the work that myself & my team did on expense management is still a part of the Paylocity product suite, with some design system changes of course.

It speaks volumes to the value of asking questions, listening to the data, and designing for the end user with patterns consistency baked in.