Mobile Product — 2023
Ridgeline Fieldwork
An inspection app designed for cold hands, thick gloves, direct sun and no signal.
Field technicians log a site visit in 90 seconds instead of nine minutes.
- Client
- Ridgeline Utilities
- Discipline
- Mobile UX for hostile conditions
- Engagement
- 10 weeks, Aug to Oct 2023
- Team
- Two mobile engineers, one operations manager
Overview
Ridgeline maintains water infrastructure across four rural counties. Technicians were completing inspection reports on paper in the field and re-entering them into a desktop system that evening, which meant every report arrived at least a day late and about a tenth of them never arrived at all.
The previous mobile attempt had been a responsive rendering of the desktop form. It was abandoned within a month. I spent three days riding along with technicians before I opened Figma, and that is the only reason the second attempt worked.
Role
Product designer, contract
10 weeks, Aug to Oct 2023 · Two mobile engineers, one operations manager
- Three days of contextual enquiry riding with technicians in the field
- Task analysis of the eleven most common inspection types
- Full interface design for the offline-first mobile app
- Sync conflict and queue states
- Glove-friendly interaction specification and outdoor contrast testing
Problem
Three days in the field produced constraints no office session would have given me. Technicians wear thick insulated gloves for eight months of the year. Two of the four counties have coverage gaps measured in hours, not minutes. Phones are held one-handed while the other hand holds a torch, a valve key or a gate.
And the biggest one: technicians did not trust the app to have saved their work. The previous version had lost data during a sync failure, once, eighteen months earlier, and everyone still remembered it. Restoring that trust was a design problem, not an engineering one.
Process
Ride-alongs before wireframes
Three days, four technicians, nineteen site visits. I timed each task and photographed the actual working conditions. The screenshots of a phone in direct November sun did more to settle the contrast debate than any WCAG citation could have.
Designing for a gloved thumb
Minimum target size went to 64px against the 44px convention, measured against a gloved thumb rather than a bare one. Primary actions sit in the bottom third of the screen, reachable one-handed. Nothing critical lives in a corner.
Offline as the default assumption
The app assumes no connection and treats sync as a bonus. Every record shows its own state plainly: saved on device, queued, or synced. Technicians can see their pending queue at any time without hunting for it.
Rebuilding trust visibly
After each entry the app confirms saved to this phone with a timestamp, and the queue count is permanently visible in the header. Nothing about this is technically necessary. It is entirely about a team that had been burned once and needed to see the evidence.
Tested outdoors, in February
Usability sessions ran in a car park at minus nine degrees with the actual gloves on. Two interactions that tested perfectly indoors failed completely, including a swipe-to-complete gesture that gloves cannot perform reliably.
Outcomes
- 90 sec
- Median time to log a site visit, down from 9 minutes
- 100%
- Of inspections now filed same day
- 0
- Records lost to sync conflict since launch
- 4.6/5
- Technician satisfaction, up from 1.9
The satisfaction score matters more than it looks. This team had been handed two tools they hated. Getting to 4.6 took listening in the field far more than it took interface craft.
Gallery
Tools
- Figma
- ProtoPie
- Dovetail
- Contrast Checker
- Real hardware
