Einstein Bros. Bagels App

Bagel Brands had an app. It had a store finder, a rewards card, and an ordering system that had been patched for years and was failing people at the moment they were hungriest. Rewards counted what you bought and did nothing with the count. Ratings were low, and the reviews said why.

I led UX at Xpanxion on the rebuild, working directly with the Bagel Brands product team. The brief was Einstein Bros. first, then take whatever we got right to Bruegger's Bagels and Noah's New York Bagels.

The question

Before any screens, one question: what does a regular actually want from this app at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning?

The answer was short. Reorder the usual, know the reward is there, get out. Everything else, the menu browsing, the gifting, the nutrition, is real but secondary. That answer set the priority for the whole build: the order flow and the rewards had to work together, or nothing else mattered.

What I designed and built

A new design system, in Figma, from the ground up. A component library that engineering could build against and that the other two brands could re-skin without redesigning. Type, color, spacing, and every state of every control, so that "add a bagel" looked and behaved the same in three apps.

Ordering, rebuilt. The legacy flow was replaced with one that handled customization, favorites, and reorders without dead ends. We added features the old system couldn't carry, and we made the cart honest about what was in it.

Rewards that apply. Points earned in an order, shown in the order, redeemable on the next order. The old app tracked; the new one pays out. This sounds like a small change. It was the change customers had been asking for in reviews for years.

The store side. Alongside the customer app I designed the admin interface stores use to manage inventory, ingredients, and location-specific details. The customer sees a menu that's true because a manager updated it that morning in a tool that made that easy. Most app case studies stop at the phone. The app is only as good as what the store can keep current.

How it ran

Weekly standups with product managers, engineers, and the business analyst. I owned UX and UI end to end, brought flows to stakeholders with the tradeoffs already drawn, and adjusted with engineering when the platform pushed back. The design system meant those adjustments landed once and propagated everywhere.

One decision I'd defend

Building the store admin at the same time as the customer app, not after. The argument against was obvious: scope. The argument for was that a beautiful order screen showing an item the store ran out of at 9 a.m. is a broken promise, and the reviews were full of broken promises. Fixing the data path fixed the experience.

What happened

The app in the App Store today is the one we shipped. It holds a 4.8-star rating across more than 120,000 ratings. The same system runs Bruegger's and Noah's.

The thing I'm proudest of isn't the number. It's that three brands with different personalities run on one set of components, and none of them look like a template.