Field notebook

The problem

A team of ecologists was recording observations on paper, photographing the pages at the end of each day and typing them up at night. Every trip lost a few hours to transcription and a few records to bad handwriting.

They had tried two note-taking apps. Both assumed a connection, and both lost work when the phone went offline halfway through an entry.

What I did

• Ran a week of field visits to watch how notes were actually taken — mostly one-handed, often in gloves, rarely with more than a minute to spare.
• Designed a single-screen capture flow: a large tap target per observation type, location filled in automatically, and free text only when it is needed.
• Built it as a progressive web app that saves every keystroke locally and syncs when a connection comes back, with a visible "saved on this phone" state so nobody has to wonder.

Outcome

Transcription went away entirely. The team now spends the evening reviewing a day's records instead of typing them, and the error rate on species codes fell because codes are picked from a list rather than written by hand.

"It's the first app we haven't had to work around." — the field team lead