Mobile App - Contractor Job Workflow Optimisation

Constraints

• Native mobile platform limitations (iOS/Android version support)
• Limited engineering capacity with competing priorities and availability constraints
• No established design system - required building and refactoring components
• Fixed 4-week delivery deadline

Problem

Trade contractors were completing only 12 jobs per week - significantly below expectations and directly impacting their earnings. Our initial assumption was that job complexity was the issue. However, user research and data analysis revealed the actual bottleneck: workflow inefficiencies in the mobile app were causing contractors to take 14 minutes per job instead of the 7-8 minutes we'd observed in internal testing.

Process

• Reviewed product analytics from Microsoft Clarity to understand user behaviour of how contractors were completing jobs (Understand)
• Conducted interview sessions with 8 contractors to understand and observe actual workflows (Understand)
• Identified pain points through journey mapping and time-on-task analysis (Understand)
• Discovered that contractors were getting confused and stuck in a loop at key stages of the workflow to test if the hardware was connected to the system (Understand)
• Led cross-functional problem framing workshops with operations, engineering, and contractor representatives to prioritise friction points, align on problem statements, and define success metrics (Define)
• Applied systems thinking to identify opportunities beyond the immediate workflow problem - recognised that the existing component architecture was creating maintenance debt and inconsistent UI patterns (Decide)
• Created high-fidelity prototypes focused on improving the workflow and moving the testing of devices to the end with clearer messaging (Design)
• Worked with engineering to refactor core UI components using a more scalable design system approach, reducing future code maintenance costs while solving the workflow issues (Design)
• Conducted follow-up interviews with contractors 4 weeks after launch to validate improvements and gather feedback (Validate)
• Held team retrospective to reflect on what went well, what could be improved, and key learnings to apply to future projects (Reflect)

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Stakeholder Management

I presented research findings to senior management using the UX research Miro board to demonstrate user pain points, followed by an interactive Figma prototype showing the proposed solution. Senior management was initially hesitant about including UI component refactoring due to the additional time required. I advocated for the refactoring by demonstrating how it would reduce future code maintenance costs and ensure UI consistency across the app. After presenting the long-term benefits and technical debt reduction, I successfully gained their agreement to include the refactoring work in the project scope.

Design Specifics

Reflection

The key learning was the importance of field observation and talking with customers over assumptions. Our internal testing didn't account for the messy reality of job sites - with contractors having to juggle so many things at once. The workflow was confusing and slowing them down. If I were to approach this again and had been involved at the start of the project, I would have involved contractors much earlier in the design process, potentially as co-designers.

Tools