Design for thumbs on a steering wheel
A field app gets read in one glance by someone distracted and on their feet. I packed every link onto the screen, and the driver could miss the only thing that mattered.
The person I design field apps for is holding the phone in one hand, half-looking at it, with a steering wheel or a parcel in the other. They are not browsing. They have a second, maybe two, to see what to do next and do it. If the important thing isn’t obvious in that glance, it may as well not exist.
I forgot this once, in the most predictable way possible. I had a rich data model behind a delivery, so I put all of it on the order screen. Every related record, every link, every status the system could offer. It was, technically, complete. It was also a wall of options in which the one action that actually mattered, uploading proof of delivery, was just another line. And so drivers missed it. Not because they were careless. Because I had hidden the only thing that mattered inside everything that didn’t.
Completeness is the enemy of a glance
The instinct, when you have a lot of data, is to surface it. Resist it on a field screen. The driver does not need the whole object graph between two deliveries. They need to know the one thing to do right now, and they need it loud.
So I rebuilt the screen around brutal hierarchy:
- One loud primary action. The proof-of-delivery upload became a big, obvious, unmissable button. Everything else got smaller, quieter, or moved a tap away.
- Glanceable, no scroll. Everything that matters fits on one screen without scrolling, because a scroll is something you do when you have attention to spare, and they don’t.
- Demote, don’t delete. The other data still exists, one level down, for the rare moment someone needs it. It just stops competing with the job.
Enforce the workflow, don’t just suggest it
The deeper fix wasn’t visual. If a step truly must happen, a pretty button isn’t enough; people under pressure route around anything optional. So the workflow gets enforced in code. You cannot quietly close out a delivery without the proof the business depends on. The screen makes the right action obvious, and the system makes skipping it impossible.
On a field screen, every element you add competes with the one that matters. Hierarchy isn’t decoration. It’s whether the job gets done.
There’s a humbling lesson in here about my own instincts. As the person who built the data model, I find all of it interesting, so I want to show all of it. The driver finds exactly one thing interesting: getting paid for this drop and moving to the next. Designing for them meant taking away almost everything I was proud of having connected, and leaving one button loud enough to survive a glance from someone whose real attention is on the road.