Mobile App for Building Inspectors

ABOUT

Inspectors did a lot of work on pen and paper. They could use our apps to be more productive on the field; but they were seldom using them. These apps were running on bulky devices based on legacy technology.

TEAM

Research and Insights

Key Insights

At the start of the day, each inspector spends 45 minutes to print out their job list, retrieve all relevant information and plan their route

On the job sites, an inspector juggle between custom printed reports, reference materials, bulky equipments and instruments to perform work

At the end of the day, an inspector comes back into the office and has to digitize all the notes from the field back on their desk software

Design Strategy

While we wanted to design an app for productivity, make it easy to adopt and help coordinating with stakeholders, we also wanted to address core motivations such as

How do we get inspectors to pick up a phone or tablet?

How do we make their jobs better?

How do we make the experience easy to use?

Key Experience Areas

We decided to focus on the following experience areas.

1. Unified Job List

A combined list of inspections and code enforcement cases

2. Job Details

This would be a collated view of everything the inspector needs to know

3. Search and Offline Mode

Allow inspectors to see jobs nearby and learn about jobs while being offline

4. Supervisor Mode

Help supervisors to more easily assign and manage inspections

Low Level Design Exploration

To kick things off, I organized a workshop, where we explored different ways to compose an unified job list for an inspector.

Designs for User Testing

We tested a new interaction pattern where a list transitioned into a card and morphed into a detailed view to provide every detail an inspector needed for a job.

Learnings from User Testing

While we wanted to design an app for productivity, make it easy to adopt and help coordinating with stakeholders, we also wanted to address core motivations such as

Inspectors liked the organization of information on the card view

They appreciated the ability to take quick actions against an inspection

Getting to the detailed view was not obvious and felt like a lot of steps

The navigation and the taxonomy of content is where we saw most inspectors having a hard time with

Final Designs

Here are some screens from the final user experience that was launched on mobile.

Here are some final user experience screenshots for tablet. We explored a supervisor mode on the app to distribute and assign inspections to a fleet; which did not make to the final app.

Results and Impact

I had moved on to Oracle before this project reached the finish line

A lot of churn on R&D, setting high expectations and not meeting them with clients did not get this to a great outcome

The biggest contribution was the pathway and vision it served to help move inspectors from paper to digital