The best software for field teams is the one that works with wet hands

Most business software assumes you're sitting at a desk, with a keyboard, a decent screen and as long as you like. Plenty of your people aren't.

Engineers on site, drivers on a round, surveyors in a field, skippers at a helm. They work in glare, rain and noise, with gloves on or one hand free, and they can’t stop to fill in a form. When the software gets in the way, they stop using it, and the data you hoped to collect never turns up.

What we learned building Go Pottie

Go Pottie is a mobile app that records the locations of lobster pots and alerts sailors as they approach (case study). Pots are marked by small floats that are hard to see, and running over one can wrap a line around a propeller. The app keeps a shared picture of where pots are and warns the sailor in time to change course.

Designing for a boat taught us a handful of principles that apply to almost any field team.

1. Design for the worst conditions, not the demo. If it’s readable in bright sunlight on a moving boat, it will be readable in an office. The reverse isn’t true. We test with big type, high contrast and no reliance on fine detail.

2. Be quiet until it matters. A skipper’s eyes and hands are busy. The best screen is a calm one that stays out of the way and speaks up only when there’s something to act on. Alerts must be clear and early enough to be useful, and rare enough to be trusted.

3. Make the common action one tap. Anything people do all day should take a single, forgiving touch. Tiny targets and multi-step forms don’t survive a bumpy ride.

4. Use what the phone already knows. GPS, the camera and the clock can fill in details so people don’t have to type. Every field you can pre-fill is a field nobody skips.

5. Assume the signal will drop. Field work means patchy coverage. The app should keep working and sync when it can, rather than showing an error and losing someone’s work.

Where this applies to your business

You may not have lobster pots, but you may have:

• Site inspections and snagging lists that end up as a pile of photos and a typed report back at the office.
• Delivery and collection rounds where proof of delivery is a signature on paper.
• Equipment checks and compliance logs filled in at the end of the week from memory.
• Stock counts in a warehouse or yard, written on a clipboard and typed in later.
• Job tracking for engineers who phone the office for the next address.

Each one involves someone capturing information in a place where a laptop isn’t practical, and someone else re-typing it later. That double-handling is the cost, and it’s usually the first thing worth removing.

What a good field tool gets you

• Data captured once, at the moment and place it happens.
• Fewer mistakes, because nothing is remembered or re-typed.
• Faster invoicing and reporting, because the data arrives complete.
• A tool people actually use, because it was designed around their day.

Don’t skip the people

The step that makes or breaks these projects is finding out how the work really happens. We spend time with the people who will use the tool, watching and asking, before drawing a single screen. The best idea in the world fails if it needs two free hands and a quiet room.

Got a team working away from a desk?

If paper, photos and phone calls sit between your field team and your systems, talk to us. Our Build service designs and builds tools around how your people actually work, with Amy designing alongside the users and Rory making sure it’s fast, secure and ready to connect to the rest of your systems.