Redesigning the field technician experience

Designing for the field: one platform, one thumb, zero margin for error

A field service app for technicians working outdoors, in gloves, with a signal that comes and goes. 

The challenge 

Technicians were juggling 5+ apps to do one job. Work orders got lost, screens lagged, and people leaned on memory and personal workarounds to get through a shift. The client was losing 70% of its technicians. 

The stakes

My Role

I was part of the redesign of the technician experience end-to-end, from early ideation through high-fidelity screens, working closely with business and product partners. My contributions included:

Wireframes, mid-fidelity and high-fidelity screen design
Adapting and extending the existing design system for the new iOS app
Prototyping key interactions and flows
Leading user interviews and synthesizing research findings

The Research

Before sketching a single screen, we needed to understand what it actually felt like to be a technician on the ground. Through a series of user interviews, we sat down with the people using these tools every day — and what we heard was consistent: the technology meant to support their work had become the biggest obstacle to it.

A few themes kept surfacing:

Technicians had developed personal workarounds just to get through a shift
Switching between apps mid-task broke concentration and caused errors
Slow load times weren't a minor annoyance — in the field, they translated to real delays and missed deadlines
Many felt their frustrations had gone unheard for a long time

Design Process & Solutions

With a clear picture of technician pain points, the design process began where it always should — with pen and paper. Early sketches focused less on aesthetics and more on logic: what does a technician actually need to see first thing in the morning? What information is critical mid-task? What can wait?

Those rough sketches evolved into wireframes, where structure and flow took shape. Every screen was pressure-tested against a simple question: does this make the job easier, or just different? From there, wireframes moved into high-fidelity screens — where the real work of crafting a tool people would actually want to use began.

Three ideas guided the final solution:

One app, not five. One of the most impactful decisions was consolidation. Instead of forcing technicians to context-switch between separate tools for navigation, time tracking, and task management, everything was brought into a single unified experience. Less switching meant fewer errors, less frustration, and a dramatically smoother shift.
Work orders that guide, not just inform. Rather than dumping a list of tasks on a technician and hoping for the best, the redesigned work order experience was built to guide execution — surfacing the right information at the right moment, reducing missed steps and the costly follow-up visits they caused.
A design system built to scale. The existing design system needed more than a facelift — it needed to flex. Components were adapted and extended to support the new app's needs while staying consistent enough that the experience felt cohesive, not cobbled together.