The brief

Build Files is a field service management platform for construction crews. We designed and built two paired surfaces: a dispatcher web app and a crew-facing mobile app. Live map tracking, job check-ins, material orders, and invoicing all work across both surfaces, with information flowing both ways in real time.

What we solved

Field service tools either over-serve the dispatcher and frustrate the crew, or over-serve the crew and leave dispatch flying blind. The crew lives on a phone with gloves on, in noisy environments, with patchy reception. Dispatch lives on a laptop with three tabs open. Both need different things from the same data, and any latency between them causes real money to be lost.

How we got there

We started by following dispatchers and crews in the field. The crew app got designed for one-handed operation with gloves on: large tap targets, no typing where it could be avoided, and aggressive offline support. The dispatcher web app got designed around a single view: where every crew is, what they're working on, and what's blocking them. Both surfaces share a single source of truth.

What we shipped

The crew app surfaces today's jobs, current dispatch instructions, and a single button to check in or out of a site. Material orders are voice-input optional. The dispatcher web app shows live crew positions on a Mapbox layer with job statuses overlaid. SMS-based crew alerts keep even outdated phones in the loop.

What changed for the client

Dispatchers are running their workflows three times faster than the legacy system Build Files replaced. Forty contractors onboarded in the first six months, and crew adoption hit ninety percent within the first two weeks of rollout, which is unheard of in this category.