Role
UI Designer
User Researcher
Prototype Designer
Interaction Designer
Team
Engineering
Sales
Leadership
Overview
The Oncue mobile app is a purpose-built Native app that allows moving company owners to manage their business on the go. With the app, owners can monitor their weekly earnings, manage their calendar, check in on upcoming and ongoing jobs, and stay up-to-date with new bookings.
Background
As moving companies grow, demands on the owner’s time dramatically increase. At Oncue, we observed that the owners we worked with were constantly being pulled away from their offices into the field to either service jobs or handle customer situations. They needed some way to stay in touch with the basics of their business while out in the field, or better yet, while taking a well-deserved weekend off.
I worked with moving company owners and Oncue leadership to learn more about their needs. I worked with owners to better understand what they absolutely had to know about their business at a glance. The more I learned, the more I understood that getting away from the office was about more than running a company. It was about getting their time back.
Build an business-owner facing app that will integrate into their day-to-day lives and allow them to keep a finger on the pulse of their business.
Users
Oncue’s business owners
Movers in the field
Needs
Access to Oncue platform on-the-go
Realtime updates to sales and moving activity
Calendar of upcoming moves and events
Wants
Feel connected from anywhere
Be able to get out of the office and spend time with family
Challenge
How can we build, test, and launch a viable app in six weeks to meet the needs of owners during the upcoming summer moving season?
Goals
Design, build, test, and launch an owner-focused mobile app
Map out future product development to add usability and functionality
Launch to App Store and Google Play ASAP
Deliverables
Task Flows
Competitive Analysis
Wireframes
Visual Design
Tools
Pencil & Paper
Sketch
Figma
Principle
Zeplin
React Native (Development)
TestFlight (Mobile Testing)
Jira (Task management)
Approach
As the sole designer, I was responsible for researching, designing, and prototyping the MVP of the owner-focused mobile app.
The team was challenged by Oncue’s founders to launch the app in six weeks, just in time for the end of the 2018 summer moving season.
Research and User Interviews
I conducted user interviews in attempt to determine the following:
What do owners stand to gain from a mobile app?
What aspects of their business do they closely monitor or check in on the most?
When they aren’t able to access the Oncue web platform, how do they stay up-to-date with their business?
In addition to interviews, I worked with the engineering team to identify design patterns and navigation structures on mobile apps that we used regularly. This helped me to determine the initial design direction for the layout and navigation structure of the Oncue app.
While not particularly robust or scientific, the research and user interviews proved key in building out the initial screens and flows of the app.
Design Development
I started pencil and paper and quickly sketched out numerous ideas to get feedback from the engineering team.
I used stock iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Google Material Design as baselines for functionality. This allowed me to incorporate user interview feedback, iterate quickly, cherrypick design elements, and design so that the engineering team could develop quickly using React Native.
UI Design
Once navigation and layout was established and in development, I started in on the UI and styling. Focus for the UI was to keep things simple and easy to take in at a glance.
Most of the colors were carried over from the Oncue web platform and applied in similar fashion within the app. Numerous components rely heavily on color for rapid identification.
Home
Mobile dashboard and snapshot of the week to date.
Calendar
Upcoming and active jobs displayed in schedule view.
Activity/Updates
New bookings, active job updates, and payments all appear here.
Job Details
Basic job details help owners see what they can expect for each job.
Ongoing Development
The mobile app is live and in active use by Oncue’s business owners.
The latest release includes:
Onsite Quote Creation
Movers conduct on-sites for larger moves to ensure a job is properly quoted and get accurate inventory.
Mobile quote generation and job booking is an update I am actively working on.
This feature will be the first feature to introduce ‘edit’ functionality into the app, requiring major overhaul of the existing code by Oncue’s engineering team.
Photo Upload
One update that will be introduced after onsite quoting is launched is the ability to upload photos to individual jobs.
Being able to take and upload pictures to the app will improve the accuracy of inventorying, claim management, and quote creation.
Early UI and flow for uploading photos. Mocks are in iPhone X frames.
Final Thoughts
The Oncue mobile app was designed and built in about six weeks. It is live and in active use. The engineering team at Oncue pulled out all the stops to bring my designs, UI, and UX to life.
I’d hoped to revisit the mobile app as our engineering team’s resources expanded. In January 2020, I began transitioning design of the Oncue platform from stock Bootstrap to custom Material UI over a React framework.
Design of the mobile app would have also benefitted greatly from incorporating pre-built UI components.