As a product design intern on PlanGrid's Field Reports team, I conducted looked at usage analytics, conducted interviews, and ran tests to identify usability issues with our information architecture and suggest design changes for our reporting tool.
Image credits: Storyblocks Video
PlanGrid builds project management and field productivity software for the construction industry. The company launched in 2013 with an iPad app that allowed users to markup blueprints on a mobile device and eliminates the need for bringing expensive paper blueprints to construction sites. Over the years, PlanGrid has expanded its scope to cover many more construction related tasks.
Screenshot from the PlanGrid website.
PlanGrid has a product called Field Reports that helps construction workers fill out reports and send them to their supervisors. These reports can include daily logs, safety checklists and time sheets and are required for legal liability purposes on the construction site.
Examples of field reports that a user might fill out on PlanGrid.
In Field Reports, report managers can upload blank PDF templates and assign them to submitters to fill them out. In the system, blank PDFs are referred to as templates and submitted documents are referred to as reports.
The problem was that the way they were represented in our interface caused people to constantly get confused between the template and report objects. We had a high volume of customer support tickets stating users were confused by the functionality of each of the objects. On top of this, PlanGrid employees would constantly mistake one of the objects for the other during internal meetings!
The table view for reports (top) and templates (bottom) looked extremely similar.
When users open Field Reports, they are shown a list of templates. If they want to create a new report or see a list of submitted reports, they need to click a template in the table view, then they'll see all the reports submitted using that template.