01The Problem
What wasn't working
Utility field crews worked offline with paper forms, and completed jobs reached the office days late — or not at all.
02The Challenge
Where it started
The app had to be genuinely usable offline. Crews work in remote areas and cannot wait for a connection to log a completed job. Photos, signatures, and timestamps all had to work in the field and reconcile cleanly with the office system once connectivity returned.
03Research & Planning
Finding the real problem
We rode along with crews in both suburban and rural routes. The biggest insight was that data entry needed to survive interruptions: crews start a job, lose signal, finish, and sync hours later. The app had to make that invisible to the crew while guaranteeing the office got complete, correct data.
04Design
Designing for the people who use it
The UI uses large buttons and high-contrast layouts for use in direct sunlight and with gloved hands. Jobs appear as a clear queue, and every completed job shows a sync status icon. Crew feedback in testing eliminated several taps from the most common job type.
05Architecture
The technical blueprint
React Native with a local-first data store. All job data is written to the device database, and a sync engine uploads changes in the background whenever the device finds a connection. Conflict resolution uses last-write-wins per field with a full edit history. The backend exposes a GraphQL API to the dispatch office.
06Development
Building in shippable increments
The sync engine was built first and load-tested against simulated weak-network conditions. We piloted with one crew for three weeks, fixing real-world edge cases like multiple devices signing the same job and partial sync failures. The office dashboard and supervisor views shipped alongside the mobile app.
07Final Solution
What shipped
An offline-first mobile app for crews to receive jobs, capture data, and sync automatically when connectivity returns.
SwiftField now receives completed job data within hours instead of days. Billing starts from accurate field timestamps, supervisors manage twice the crew with the same effort, and the paper forms are retired.
08Key Features
What the product does
- Offline-first job capture with automatic sync
- Photo and signature capture with tamper-evident timestamps
- Navigation and job queue for field crews
- Time-on-site tracking for billing accuracy
- Instant supervisor visibility into crew status
- Sync conflict resolution for concurrent edits
09Technology
The stack
- React Native
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Firebase
- GraphQL
