Amazon & Walmart Employee Stock Apps

Overview

Computershare administers employee stock plans for some of the largest companies in the world. Two of them, Amazon and Walmart, needed real mobile apps so employees could manage their stock from a phone instead of a dated desktop portal. I was the lead UX/UI designer on both.

The problem

Employees were stuck managing their stock through an old desktop experience. There was no proper mobile option, even as people increasingly expected to handle money from their phones. Earlier attempts with other developers had not produced anything that shipped. The job was to build trustworthy, on-brand apps that could handle real financial actions: viewing shares, selling, contributions, and tax documents.

My role

I was the main UX/UI designer on the project, the design point person on a Scrum team that included the product owner, a scrum master, business analysts, developers, and testers. I owned the UX and UI work: the user flows, the logic and host-mapping documents, and how the apps looked and behaved. I worked closely with the product owner to turn business requirements into designs, and coordinated with the brand and UX teams at both Amazon and Walmart.

Two brands, two apps

Amazon and Walmart each have a strong, distinct identity, and each app had to feel like it belonged to that company. So instead of one app reskinned twice, I designed two versions that each carried the right brand while sharing the same underlying structure and flows.

Amazon Direct Stock Purchase Plan

Walmart Associate Stock Purchase Plan

Designing for trust

These apps move money and show sensitive financial data, so they had to feel secure without getting in the way. Biometric login keeps everything locked down. From there, the actions people actually came for stay easy to reach: check your shares, sell, pull a tax document. Daily contribution tracking and activity alerts round it out.

Getting it shipped

Getting employee-only apps onto the public App Store took some doing. Apple restricts apps meant for a single company’s staff, and the team worked through those requirements to get both onto iOS, alongside the Android releases.

Outcome

Both apps shipped on iOS and Android, and downloads climbed past 80,000 and kept counting. Two of the largest employers in the country got modern, on-brand apps their people could actually use to manage real money from their phones, where earlier attempts had never made it to launch.