A native iPad experience for thousands of field technicians at a tier-one operator. Offline-first, glove-friendly, and built around the actual sequence of work — not the org chart.
The operator's field technicians used two tools to do their work — a legacy desktop application open on a vehicle laptop for job intake, and a mobile app for closing tickets. The two did not talk to each other. Both were designed around the organisational chart — built by IT for ops, built by ops for IT — not around the actual rhythm of a field technician's day.
Senior leadership had heard enough complaints. They wanted a single tool, on a single device, designed for the technician in the field. Not an iteration of either existing tool. Not a wrapped web app. A native experience that respected patchy networks, large gloves, harsh sun, and the speed of a person who has six more tickets to close before lunch.
We spent more time on the ground than at our desks. The brief looked simple — design a better tool. The work was anything but. The first finding from the field research broke the team's initial product hypothesis. We listened to the field, not the brief.
We rode along with technicians across two regions. Twelve full shifts, six different equipment types. We logged every UI tap, every retry on patchy networks, every workaround the team had built to make the existing tools usable. The research report had three findings senior leadership had never heard before — and changed the brief.
We restructured the work around the technician's actual sequence — receive ticket, travel, arrive on site, diagnose, execute, close. The old tools were structured around data models. The new one is structured around what happens on the ground. The data model serves the workflow, not the other way around.
Native iPad. Offline-first sync with conflict resolution. A design system built for outdoor readability — high contrast, large hit targets, no animations that would make a tired technician motion-sick. The engineering pod worked from the same design system; no two interpretations of any component were ever in play.
Released to two hundred technicians across two cities. Daily field observations for the first two weeks. The most important adjustment came from those sessions — a redesign of the diagnosis flow that we had been confident about. The pilot proved it wrong. The technicians were right.
The new tool replaced both legacy systems. Technicians went from two devices to one. Daily ticket throughput improved meaningfully. Most importantly, technicians stopped reporting tool problems in their daily standup — which is what the field manager had said would be the real measure. The design system has since been handed over to the operator's internal team.
It is the first time IT has built something that respects how we actually work. We stopped having to fight the tool to do the job.