Mobile Field Inspection Platform

A utility serving 800,000+ customers ran infrastructure inspections on paper. Every week, 140 inspectors drove to remote sites, filled out 8-page checklists on clipboards, took photos on personal phones, then drove back and transcribed everything into a desktop system. Transcription alone ate 2–3 hours per inspector per week.

The paper-to-digital gap was also a compliance problem. Auditors had flagged the utility twice for incomplete records: photos stranded on personal camera rolls, illegible handwriting, self-reported timestamps. A storm the previous year destroyed a batch of paper forms before transcription — that gap in the inspection record cost a $200K regulatory fine.

Three weeks of ride-alongs across four districts reset my assumptions. These users work in rain, snow, and 100°F heat. They wear heavy gloves that defeat touchscreens. They balance clipboards on their knees in truck cabs and pass through cell dead zones several times a day — some substations have zero connectivity.

I documented 23 distinct inspection workflows across asset types. Same skeleton — arrive, assess, document, submit — but the details and regulatory documentation standards diverged by asset. The back-office team added the final piece: drawers full of sticky-note workarounds for data quality issues. When one inspector writes "OK" in a condition field, he means something different than when another does. The vocabulary problem compounded across thousands of inspections.

Offline-first drove every architectural decision. The app could never assume connectivity, so all data captured locally, synced when coverage returned. That complicated everything — validation without a server round trip, conflict handling, showing sync status without creating anxiety.

Physical ergonomics came before pixels. I built a foam-core mockup and had inspectors simulate tasks wearing work gloves under sun glare. Standard 44px touch targets failed; we settled on a 56px minimum. My junior designer turned those sessions into the glove-mode spec: bigger targets, no pinch, no long-press, no swipe.

For the checklists, we replaced free text with structured inputs anchored to photos — a standardized condition scale where each level shows what it actually looks like for that asset type. "OK" stopped being ambiguous.

The app shipped as a React Native application with SQLite local storage and background sync via Firebase, organized around three states: pre-inspection briefing, active inspection, and post-inspection review.

This project permanently changed how I think about context. Every principle from years of web and desktop work had to be re-examined against field conditions. Progressive disclosure is great until your user is squinting at a 6-inch screen in direct sunlight and needs the answer now.

The ride-alongs were the highest-ROI research I've ever done. I watched an inspector prop his phone against a transformer housing, angle it out of the glare, peel off one glove to type, and re-glove to climb a ladder — one finding, a dozen design decisions. And the sync indicator turned out to be a trust signal, not a technical feature: years of destroyed and illegible paper had taught inspectors to fear data loss. They needed to see their work was safe.