A field-first driver app for biohazard waste pickups, built around the shift, not the desk.
Overview
BioWaste handles regulated medical and biohazard collections across hospitals and clinics. Their drivers were stuck running desk-built dispatch software from the cab — a pinch-zoom UI that fell apart in gloves, glare, and a 6 a.m. start. The job is unforgiving: a missed manifest is a regulatory issue, not a paperwork issue. I designed a mobile app that treats the driver's shift as the product, not an afterthought.
Challenge
The legacy dispatch tool was built for office staff and bolted onto a phone. Drivers were zooming, scrolling, and re-entering data with gloves on, between stops, in low light.
- Gloved hands and glare break ordinary tap targets and contrast assumptions
- Manifests captured at end-of-shift left compliance gaps when something went wrong
- A list-view of stops gave no sense of where the driver was in the day
- Field support sat behind menus when a hazard report needed to take seconds
Role
I led product design end-to-end on the mobile side. Research, flows, system, and ship-ready specs across iOS and Android.
- Shadowed driver shifts to understand the real rhythm and where the old tool failed
- Mapped the full day from 6 a.m. handoff through final manifest sync
- Designed every primary surface. Dashboard, route, stop, manifest capture, support
- Built the mobile component library and motion patterns engineering used to ship
- Partnered with engineering on one-handed reach, gloved input, and offline edge cases
Approach
I anchored the app to the shift itself, not the data model. A driver doesn't open a dashboard. They walk into a 9-hour day with stops, hazards, and a manifest they can't afford to mess up. Every screen reduces to one decision they need to make right now.
- One primary action per screen, anchored to the thumb at the bottom
- Shift-at-a-glance home with the day's stops and a map preview, not a list
- Live timeline with tabular numerals so times line up at a glance
- Full-screen routing with a bottom sheet for the active stop. Read like Maps, act like dispatch
- Manifest capture at the moment of pickup, not at end-of-shift
- Direct line to 24/7 support with hazard reporting one tap away
Solution
A driver-side mobile experience built for gloves, glare, and tight schedules. Designed for iOS and Android, anchored on a single primary action per screen, with real-time manifest capture and hazard escalation built into the core flow.
1 tap
Hazard escalation
Real-time
Manifest sync
Key takeaway
“Field tools fail when designers skip the field. The fix wasn't more features. It was building the app around the shift, the gloves, and the 6 a.m. light. Drivers told us, in different words, that the product finally respects how the work actually happens.”