The Goal
This is a mobile app for building inspectors and code enforcement officers to use in the field.
A lot of these workers didn't want a mobile app in the field. This was especially true for those who'd worked in their jobs, on paper, for a very long time.
Technically this was redesign and design optimization work. The company had previously invested significant time and development resources into creating early tablet apps in the early 2000s and the focus at the time I joined was on combining three separate legacy tablet applications into one single application for tablets and smart phones.
Along with the Product Managers, I as UX Lead, needed a way to:
- 1) Determine why adoption of the new application was pretty low.
- 2) Discover possible usability issues and prioritize correcting them.
- 3) Devise a design plan for updating the the app so that field workers would use it. (The benefit of them doing so would be more accurate data and more timely delivery of it, to streamline and improve the overall permitting and compliance process.)
Research Methods
1. Interviews with field workers and office staff, admins, and mangers.
2. Contextual inquiry (ride-alongs with field workers and observed office staff at work)
Finding: The app was competing with paper!
Completing the process in the mobile application was perceived by most of the field inspectors as more cumbersome than using paper, even though using paper to document observations meant they had to end their day back at the office doing extra hours of data entry and then return to the site to deliver the results to the home owner or builder.
Finding: Code Officers and some Inspectors Climb
One of the most interesting things I observed riding with both Code Enforcement officers and building inspectors was that they climb. They climb up ladders, on the edges of tubs, and counters, and over walls. I saw all of these things happen and carrying a tablet to enter data on was just not feasible for this kind of work. They carried small notebooks to write things down and phones (to use as flashlights!). The app had to be most useful on a phone so an inspector could drop it in his pocket use both hands for climbing into weird places.
Finding: Code Officers and some Inspectors are In Danger
Code Officer are often not in safe circumstances when they are on site inspecting. The danger can come from faulting building, configuration or maintenance of a site, but may also come from residents, owners or other parties who angry and become abusive to the officer. This can also be true of building inspectors under certain circumstances.
Recommendations
The mobile application was already slated to undergo a “re-skin” to align with newer design system standards, so I made the case to the Product and Dev. teams that we could (and should) correct the UI flow problems by not only updating components but by allowing the UX team to fully redesign the application work flow to address the main pain points.
I wanted a simpler application UI that would work offline (as data syncing slowness was part of the issue). It needed to be easier to find data, enter data, and the flow needed to prioritizing the main tasks with less scrolling, searching. It had to reduce the cognitive load on users who were already feeling duress during interaction due to safety and speed concerns.
Journeys
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Design Concept Validation Testing
These images are a few examples of the solutions we tested with users.
For user validation on the redesign strategy, I prepared a prototype of the wireframes for completing each job type on a tablet and smart phone. Each participant was asked to go through their job type on their preferred device twice, once on the existing application and once on the prototype. They were asked to rate their speed, comfort, and difficulty in each flow.
Of ten tests, the new design prototypes performed an average of 1.5 (of 5 points) better than the existing application.