Buildtech: The Daily Reporting System

As UX Lead, I spearheaded the development of a mobile application for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to revolutionize field engineer diary reporting. This case study delves into the challenges faced by Caltrans engineers, the design approach, and the impact of the new application.

The Design Process

Identify the problem

THE EXCEL "BIBLE"

The field engineer provides the need of creating a construction management software (CMS) that can assist their organization in creating a cloud-based solution to enable their users to input daily reports. He provided us an excel sheet of the required information for the daily log.

User Research

We conducted an interview with Scottie, a field engineer from CALTRANS, who expressed his experience with one of their current solution. He walked us through the process of completing a daily report. To understand the user's requirements, we studied the private interview showing different scenarios of using the excel to input data for a daily report.

The Challenge

Previously, Caltrans field engineers relied on offline Excel spreadsheets to document their daily activities. This manual process resulted in:

• Inefficiency: Time-consuming offline data entry slowed down reporting and project updates.
• Data Inconsistency: Manually entering data into spreadsheets increased the risk of errors and inconsistencies.
• Limited Accessibility: Offline spreadsheets hindered real-time access to reports by supervisors and project managers.

Wireframing

Creating wireframes helped us analyze the problem and to create a solution

Design Alternatives

Project Grid

This screen contains all projects assigned to user. Actions like favorites and most recently accessed are unique to each users. Here, they are able to view the status of each project as well as some high level detail. The quick access menu enable users to quickly navigate to project details.

Daily Report Grid

After a user selects a project, they are able to view all daily report that have been logged. Here they're able to create new reports or duplicate from existing.

Daily Report Summary

This page drills down onto the next level where the field engineer can start inputting their daily report. The template views stay consistent from the previous level.

Reponsive Design

With the intent of distributing iPads to field engineers, it's imperative to make the application responsive but to fit perfectly in an iPad. UI component stays consistent but the layouts move around for the beautiful iPad experience