Reimagining the mobile home screen to help you understand what you're doing today

Overview

Assignar is a B2B, SaaS construction operations platform that helps contractors and subcontractors ditch paper and digitise their entire operations in the cloud. I collaborated with my squad to reimagine the home screen of the mobile app to bring immediate value from the first moment its opened and provide a clear anchor around the entire mobile experience. Full case study upon request.

Quick numbers on impact

Lowering the barrier of entry into our mobile app meant we saw over 250% organic adoption of our chat feature within the first 6 months!

Background

If you’re a construction worker, your goal is to turn up to site, build and get paid.

If you’re an office person, your goal is to get site updates to remain on time and within budget.

The purpose of Assignar’s mobile app was to achieve the user goals for construction and office workers. It enabled:

• Construction workers to understand what jobs they were doing, what time, where and who they were working with for the day.
• Log their hours, so they could be accurately paid for their services
• Log everything else that happened on site such as what equipment they used, notes, photos, expenses and more.

Many mobile apps encourage you to engage more time in their app. In construction, your focus isn’t to be on your phone, it’s to build.

At the same time, as a construction worker, you’re expected to capture detailed insight into whats happening on site, such as how much progress was done, capture any notes, photos. This can help mitigate risks associated to delays and ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget. That’s what brings in profit.

But who wants to do all this admin work after a long, sweaty day of physical work in the hot sun?

What we found when talking to our customers, is that workers don’t share the same sentiment as the office people when it comes to collecting updates, photos and notes about the state of the construction. Workers want to go to work, get paid and repeat.

We needed to reduce time to value

We conducted 15+ user interviews across the different verticals of our industry over a 2 week period. And it was clear that what we needed was balance. Reduce time to value. Construction workers need a way in the mobile app to get all their admin work done easily and as quick as possible, so those in the office can get their detailed updates from the construction site on time. Win win for everyone.

So, how do you do that?

Imagine opening up a mobile app for the first time and seeing this.

Your first thought may be, well a nav like this looks easy enough to use. But then you realise, well I’ve got a list of things I could do in the mobile app, but what should I actually do first? Now you’re faced with a number of challenges:

• Users didn’t know what to do or where to go once they opened the mobile app.
• They weren’t sure if there was a process that they needed to follow.
• In turn, users are spending more time and energy trying to figure out what they should be doing in the app, instead of just doing it.

☁️ How can we reimagine the home screen of the mobile app to bring immediate value from the first moment its opened?

We went wide with our prototype, explored and tested lots of different ideas

🚀 Mid 2024, we launched our reimagined mobile screen

Instead of ‘what now?’ — we tell you what needs to be completed to close out your day.

Workers have limited time to interact with an app while on the job site. For that reason, it’s critical that the time they do spend on Assignar mobile is efficient, intuitive, and produces results. With our new home screen, workers do not have dig through multiple screens to find out: what time they need to show up, what equipment they’re using, where to communicate with their crew, how much time have they spent working this week. Ultimately, they can engage with the app faster and more effectively so they can get back to doing what they do best…construction!

Lowering the barrier of entry into our mobile app meant we saw 250%+ organic adoption of our chat feature within the first 6 months

Removing the nav meant we could consolidate a number of different areas of the app into a single home screen and introduce a number of quick actions to get to different areas of the application. This did 3 main things:

• It reduced clicks
• Ultimately, provided a clear anchor around the entire mobile experience around a single screen.
• Saw big uptick into other areas of the application.

Empower self-onboarding.

A sizeable portion of our customer support’s time was taken up by training workers how to use our mobile app during the customer implementation phase. By consolidating and simplifying the home screen of the app, we were able to empower self-onboarding for our mobile users, reduce the onboarding time and reduce need for hand holding from our internal resources and put that time into other important customers.

If you would like to see the full case study. Please reach out 😊