The consumerization gap had already won.
Employees wanted app-store-simple access to their work tools on any device. IT had to deliver that — without giving up security, cost control, or fleet management across company-issued and BYOD hardware.
Tap an icon. It installs. It updates overnight. It just works.
A wall of software that felt like it came from a different decade.
A self-service app store — control kept behind the curtain.
A pure SaaS product to cut the cost and complexity of managing apps and content across every device. Two bets shaped everything.
Administrators need a single platform to add, manage, meter, and update every app — not a patchwork of tools.
Users want a single catalog for all their devices — mobile and desktop, not a mobile-only story.
Consumer store as reference. Enterprise as the real spec.
We studied how iOS and Android handled discovery, install, updates, and pricing — then asked what survives when one catalog has to serve mobile and desktop at once.
iOS
Browse, search, an app detail page, a one-tap download.
Android
Discovery, install, self-updating apps, consumer pricing models.
Enterprise reality
Desktop + mobile, versioning, roles, licensing. Neither store fully fit — we had to reason from the enterprise’s own constraints.
The storefront was the easy part. The machinery behind it wasn’t.
Selling a self-service platform meant every capability a vendor would normally own had to become a feature IT could operate themselves. Four distinct problems — split across three designers.
Submission
Getting apps into the store — and deciding who’s allowed to.
Management
Handling every variant of an app without the UI fracturing.
Payment
Metering and charging for apps, invisibly, in the background.
Reporting
Turning usage into decisions an admin can actually act on.
Before you download it, someone has to add it.
I designed the flow around the fields the platform already knew it needed — app details, categories, pricing, visuals.
We explored letting users contribute apps — then decided submission was an administrative act. It lives in the admin panel, not the store.
admin — the Applications list, inside the administration panel
The hard part wasn’t the CRUD. It was multiplicity.
A single “app” isn’t a single artifact. The same product might be a desktop build and a mobile build, with several versions live for different users at once.
admin — an app’s detail view, opened over the catalog
Purchasing should feel like nothing at all.
A full e-commerce-style billing system, built on HP’s existing payment back-end so app costs routed to the right place invisibly — no employee stopping to “buy” a tool they need for their job.
Invisibility. Cost routed behind the scenes, not into the user’s way.
The full flow — account setup, the purchase path, and every card & currency edge case:
Read more about PaymentThe right consumer pattern was the wrong enterprise one.
Individual checkout
Credit-card-style, closer to how a consumer pays in iOS or Android. It’s what the wireframes show.
Team-based accounting
Charges assigned to a person’s team, not paid individually. The pivot began as my contract ended.
A pattern that’s obviously right in a consumer context can be quietly wrong in an enterprise one. Keep interrogating the borrowed reference against the real user.
Legible and actionable — not a wall of numbers.
Scoped to three metrics that lined up with the features being built in parallel:
01 API usage
02 Download analytics
03 Purchase analytics
admin — API-usage analytics
One click, a whole toolkit.
Employees rarely need one app — they need the set that goes with their job. Making them install each one was exactly the friction the catalog was built to remove.
Download a bundle in a single click.
Create, edit, remove — purpose clear at a glance.
Stop grouping by what the apps are. Group by who they’re for.
Bundle by app type
“All the design applications.” Literal — but not how IT provisions people.
Bundle by user type
Everything a marketer or a designer needs — tied to roles & groups.
A type-agnostic pattern — driven by each application’s own details — so one bundle can hold desktop and mobile apps at multiple price points, with no special-casing.
The bundle builder screen by screen — main view, menu, single- and multi-price-point bundles:
Read more about BundlesGetting apps on a device is the easy half.
Keeping a whole fleet current is the hard, ongoing half — and in an enterprise, stale software is a security liability. OTA kept the promise: current apps and content, seamlessly, without compromising security.
Employees receive updates the way a consumer expects their phone to quietly update itself.
Updates respect identity, roles, and security posture — with admin visibility and control over what’s pushed to whom.
Never one blunt push — a targeted rollout: which version, to which users, on which device type.
Three designers. One interconnected system.
The risk was a product that felt like it was designed by three people — because it was. Two things kept it coherent.
Constant, low-friction coordination — the “how are you handling versioning?” conversation that keeps a shared system from drifting.
Split the product by feature, own it cleanly, then reconcile where it meets everyone else’s work.
A full app lifecycle, designed end to end.
A coherent, multi-platform enterprise app store — positioned to be sold as part of HP’s Anywhere platform. The framework covered an app’s entire life inside an enterprise:
KPIs set for the effort were a successful build and launch, and adoption across multiple HP enterprise customers — launch/adoption metrics land after my involvement, so I don’t quote them here.
The discipline is in the detail — and in interrogating the borrowed pattern.
Rigor ships products
A manager pushed me to be more rigorous than I thought I needed to be. That pressure shaped how I work today.
Question the reference
Consumer checkout was right — until it wasn’t. Test assumptions against the real user’s situation, not the borrowed one.
Design is coordination
On an interconnected system, owning your piece well and tending the seams is most of the job.