Mobile App For Field Service Teams

Field work punishes software designed for an office. The device is in a van or on a roof, the connection is intermittent, and the person using it is standing up and possibly wearing gloves. An app that assumes a reliable connection stops being usable within a week.

So the brief became offline-first rather than online-first. Jobs, notes and photographs are written to the device immediately and synchronised when a connection appears, with the sync queue visible to the user so nobody wonders whether their work has been saved. Conflict handling matters more than it sounds: two engineers can close the same job from different vans, and someone has to decide which record wins.

The other significant decision was typing. A job description in a dropdown is faster to build but unusable with gloves on, so free text with sensible defaults was chosen deliberately. That pushed more work onto the search and filter design later, which was the right way round.

Testing was done in the conditions the app actually runs in: short connections, interrupted uploads mid-photograph, and a full day of use without a single successful sync.

The handover covers the synchronisation rules, the conflict decisions and the permission model, all three of which the next maintainer will need before touching anything else.