Fieldnote

Client: Fieldnote, field data collection for ecologists and conservation teams. Team: four engineers, one product manager. Engagement: six months over 2023 and 2024, two days a week. Role: discovery, product design, design system.

The problem

The app was designed at a desk for people who are never at a desk. Users are in a forest or a wetland, often with one hand free, on a phone bought for the job rather than for its screen, with no signal. The existing forms were small, dense and assumed a connection.

What I did

A four week discovery in the field. I went out with three teams in two countries and watched them record data. Paper won every time, because paper does not need two hands, does not need signal and does not lose your place when the battery dies.

A form system built for those conditions.

• Big targets, one question per screen, so it can be used with a thumb and a glove.
• Offline first: everything is saved locally as you go and syncs when there is signal, with a clear indicator of what has and has not uploaded.
• High contrast, no hover states, no gestures that need two fingers.
• Resume later: a half-finished record is never lost, even if the phone dies.

A design system of 40 components with a written page per component on when to use it and when not to. Built so a team of four engineers could maintain it without a designer.

What shipped

The form system and the design system, both still in use. Records per field day per person went up by about 40 percent in the teams that were measured, mostly because fewer were abandoned.

"The design system John left us is still the one we use three years later. It is small enough that we keep it up to date." Priya Nair, Engineering lead.

What I learned

The best research method is going where the work is. Everything that matters about this product was obvious after one afternoon in a wetland and invisible in a year of analytics. I wrote more about small systems in building a design system for one.