Web and mobile solution for streamlining professional services — it’s an online marketplace that provides clients real-time access to experts.
Redesigning a 10-Year Benefits Platform Without Losing Existing Users
Emerline redesigned the product incrementally, unified the UX across 3 platforms, modernized the frontend architecture, and helped accelerate enterprise sales conversations, including Spotify onboarding.
Background
Espresa is a global benefits and employee experience platform that combines Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSA), wellbeing programs, rewards & recognition, and e mployee communities into a single ecosystem.
The platform supports enterprise organizations globally, with multiple languages and currencies. Companies such as Flex, Airbnb, Avalara, Nielsen, and Prudential use Espresa to modernize employee benefits and improve workforce engagement.
Over more than a decade of continuous growth, the product evolved into a highly customizable enterprise platform with extensive functionality across web and mobile applications. One of Espresa’s key competitive advantages was flexibility: enterprise customers could configure features, workflows, and visual branding to align with their internal processes and company identity.
However, the platform faced a common challenge for mature products: while long-term customers were comfortable with the existing workflows, prospective enterprise clients increasingly perceived the user interface as outdated.
For Espresa, modernization became more than a design initiative. It became a strategic business priority directly tied to enterprise growth, product positioning, and sales enablement.
A modernized experience became particularly important during enterprise sales conversations and helped onboard high-profile customers, including one of the leading global audio streaming platforms.
Challenges
Modernizing without interrupting existing enterprise operations
Espresa could not afford operational disruption during modernization. The platform was actively used by enterprise customers worldwide, while new features continued to be released in parallel. The challenge was not simply redesigning the interface; it was transforming a live enterprise ecosystem with years of accumulated business logic, workflows, and interconnected modules.
Preserving user adoption while improving UX
A radical redesign carried significant business risk. Existing enterprise users were deeply familiar with the current workflows, and dramatic interface changes could negatively impact adoption, usability, and customer satisfaction. The modernization strategy needed to improve the experience without forcing users to relearn the product.
Maintaining consistency across web, iOS, and Android
Espresa operated across three separate platforms, each with its own technical constraints, UI libraries, and interaction patterns. The challenge was to create a unified product experience while preserving native usability standards across web, iOS, and Android users.
Simplifying enterprise branding and customization
Customization has become a major value driver for Espresa customers. Companies used the platform as an extension of their employer brand, applying their corporate colors and visual identity throughout the experience.
However, the existing customization process had become difficult to manage and created accessibility inconsistencies across customer implementations.
The new system needed to make enterprise theming significantly easier while preserving accessibility standards and scalability.
Accelerating delivery under tight business timelines
Modernizing the product quickly became essential for supporting enterprise sales initiatives.
An updated UI was an important factor in strategic customer negotiations. This placed significant pressure on the team to modernize the experience rapidly without sacrificing platform stability or delivery speed.
Methodology and Approach
1. Building a unified modernization strategy
Emerline approached the initiative as a gradual enterprise modernization program rather than a standalone redesign project.
The first step was defining a new visual foundation that could scale consistently across web, iOS, and Android platforms while remaining recognizable to existing users.
The team conducted extensive visual research, balancing three priorities:
- preserving familiarity for long-term customers,
- aligning with Espresa’s updated product vision,
- and working within existing technical constraints.
The approved design direction became the foundation for a unified multi-platform experience.
2. Creating a scalable cross-platform design system
To support long-term scalability, Emerline developed a new enterprise design system tailored for all three platforms: web, iOS, and Android. Each platform received its own optimized component library while maintaining a consistent visual language and interaction logic across the ecosystem.
The redesign initiative also provided an opportunity to modernize the frontend architecture itself.
The legacy AngularJS implementation was progressively replaced with a modern Angular-based architecture, improving maintainability, scalability, and long-term product sustainability. Flowbite UI was used as a foundation to accelerate component delivery and standardization.
A key requirement was to make all components customization-ready from the start, enabling scalable branding capabilities across the platform.
3. Applying the new system incrementally
Once the foundational work was completed, the team began gradually applying the new design system across existing product features and user flows.
Having a production-ready component library significantly accelerated implementation. The reusable components served as building blocks for modernizing large portions of the platform efficiently and consistently, reducing development overhead.
4. Optimizing critical user flows
Beyond visual modernization, the team reviewed and refined high-impact user journeys across the platform.
UX decisions were informed by:
- customer feedback,
- existing usage patterns,
- business priorities,
- and product analytics.
This approach allowed Espresa to improve usability while preserving the familiarity enterprise users relied on in daily operations.
Solution
Unified design system across web and mobile
Emerline delivered a fully modernized design system that unified the user experience across web, iOS, and Android applications.
The new system introduced:
- a modern enterprise-ready visual language,
- reusable scalable UI components,
- cross-platform consistency,
- and improved collaboration between design and development teams.
The result was a more cohesive product experience that strengthened both usability and product perception.
Enterprise-ready customization and theming
Instead of manually configuring large numbers of visual parameters, customers now provide only a small set of core brand styles. The system automatically generates extended palettes and supporting styles.
This allowed Espresa to:
- simplify onboarding for enterprise customers,
- reduce configuration complexity,
- maintain visual consistency,
- and create more compelling branded product demos during enterprise sales conversations.
The platform became easier to personalize while remaining scalable, accessible, and operationally efficient.
Results and Impact
- Faster delivery speed
- Stronger enterprise sales enablement
- Improved product consistency across platforms
- Simplified enterprise branding with built-in accessibility
- Long-term product scalability
By aligning design and development workflows and unifying component libraries across web and mobile platforms, Emerline accelerated feature implementation and release cycles.
The reusable design system and shared UI standards enabled Espresa to achieve faster delivery speed while improving collaboration efficiency across teams.
The modernization initiative improved how the platform was perceived during enterprise sales conversations.
The redesigned experience helped position Espresa as a modern enterprise-ready solution and supported customer acquisition efforts.
The new design system created a unified experience across web, iOS, and Android, strengthening product consistency and improving the overall user experience regardless of platform.
The new theming architecture reduced the complexity of customization for enterprise customers.
Customers could apply their own branding more easily, while Espresa maintained better control over usability, readability, and accessibility standards across implementations.
Beyond the visual redesign, the initiative established a scalable foundation for future platform growth.
The combination of frontend modernization, reusable UI architecture, and scalable customization capabilities positioned Espresa for faster product evolution and continued enterprise expansion.
More Case Studies
Espresa: Custom Employee Service Platform
A culture benefits platform delivering an immersive employer experience, contributing to better recognition of HR work, and improving the overall company’s image.
Midday: Mobile App Development for Healthcare
Advanced women's health app that combines a scientific approach with data analytics to help manage menopause symptoms comfortably.
Emerline provided us with the scaling we needed to grow our development capabilities from early-stage POC to now a globally deployed platform in the HR Teach space.
We are very pleased and content with our relationship with Emerline. We rely on their team for full-stack development of our platform. We respect the high technical caliber and dedication of the team assigned to our project. Emerline provided us with the scaling we needed to grow development capabilities from early-stage POC to now a globally deployed platform in the HR Teach space.
CEO, Espresa
country
USA
company
Espresa
project summary
A culture benefits platform delivering an immersive employer experience
solution category
Human Resources
industry
Human Resources Management Software