Assignar an Cloud-Based Platform for Construction Operations & Workforce Management
Assignar is a global SaaS platform supporting 800+ contractors in managing infrastructure projects and tracking performance in real-time. Over my three years with Assignar, I led core design initiatives across both web and mobile, playing a key role in evolving the platform into a real-time operations hub.
Case #1 - Communicate with live SMS
Project overview
Admins had limited visibility into SMS delivery and replies, causing frequent communication breakdowns with field staff. Messaging was fragmented across three hard-to-find areas in the platform, with no system feedback to confirm sent or received messages. This not only increased the mental load for office admins but also created operational gaps between dashboard and field users.
Problem statement
Admins had no visibility into SMS status, causing communication breakdowns with field staff.
Goals and objectives
Improve user engagement by introducing a unified messaging system that enhances transparency, streamlines scheduling, and fosters seamless communication across operational teams. By strengthening internal workflows, we aim to increase platform stickiness and long-term adoption.
Discovery Phase
Persona outline
User goals:
Easily communicate with field staff about tasks, updates, and shift changes.
Gain clear visibility into message delivery and response status for improved transparency.
Qualitative feedback
To understand how users interacted with the previous SMS solution, I analysed 29 customer submissions on Aha Ideas related to messaging pain points. This helped surface common workflow challenges and recurring communication needs. I also gathered qualitative insights from our internal Customer Success team and conducted interviews with over 6 customers to validate patterns and uncover deeper usability issues.
Competitor Analysis
Key Insights
Audience Research
I conducted interviews with six customers to better understand pain points around the existing SMS feature. Insights were documented in Confluence for cross-team access. Key themes emerged:
Discoverability: Users often avoided using SMS due to its poor visibility within the dashboard.
Utility: SMS was essential for communicating shift updates and compliance reminders, yet it lacked accessibility across the platform.
Responsiveness: Field staff needed to reply instantly—even when away from their computers—highlighting the importance of mobile-friendly functionality.
Delivery Phase
Design and Development
Based on our research, we have developed the following strategy for this project:
Initiated the creation of a new design system, starting with a full audit of existing UI components.
Aligned the system with Material UI React to support rapid development, while customising elements to reflect our brand identity.
Designed responsive layouts for multiple breakpoints, with a strong focus on mobile usability and accessibility compliance.
Introduced a step-by-step wizard flow to guide users through the SMS experience and reduce friction.
Ensured components were modular and easily reused across different areas of the platform.
Launched the feature as a limited release to a small group of customers to gather early feedback and validate performance.
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An effective bulk messaging tool for scheduling should support high-volume texting, flexible targeting, and clear delivery feedback. Office admins must be able to message specific groups of workers and receive confirmation of message delivery or failure. Customisation is essential—allowing admins to tailor messages to projects, roles, or scenarios—enabling more relevant, actionable communication. These capabilities help streamline workflows, reduce miscommunication, and ensure field teams are always aligned with operational updates.
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During research, I explored how other platforms—such as MessageBird and Plivo—handled bulk SMS delivery. These competitors provided effective queueing systems for high-volume messages, ensuring delivery order, retry logic, and status tracking. This highlighted the importance of transparency and system feedback in our own solution, especially when admins needed to communicate with large field teams without message delays or loss.
Technical Consideration
To avoid building a custom SMS infrastructure from scratch, we leveraged Twilio as our messaging provider. This decision allowed us to move faster but required designing within Twilio’s API capabilities and limitations. I carefully considered delivery constraints, message character limits, error handling, and international messaging rules when defining the user experience. This ensured our solution was technically feasible, scalable, and aligned with both user needs and backend integration requirements
Validation Phase
From the prototype to the finished product
Initial usability testing was conducted internally with our Customer Success Managers. Followed by interviews with 6 customers to validate the prototype and gather insights.Key feedback and improvements included:
Notification logic to handle missed replies
Refined tooltip language for clarity, and confirmed that the new component’s placement and interaction model aligned with user expectations.
No major usability issues were reported, validating both the feature’s discoverability and overall user flow.
Outcomes
SMS is now a key tool for real-time communication between the field and the office; we’ve brought this front and centre. SMS can be sent and received in real-time, from any part of the web app. The messages can be sent to individual workers and groups. Check out the help doc!
The customers are satisfied with the changes below:
Instantly communication
Meaningful error messages for users.
Bulk SMS to individual workers or groups.
Support message templates
Support linking messages to a unique user ID, so if the user changes their phone number, we do not lose message history.
Roll Out Phase
Business Impact
Growth: Alongside the recently released Activity Feed, this new SMS view highlights our position as a real-time field-to-office communication platform to improve the on-site operational efficiency
Adoption: For existing customers, having SMS front and centre, particularly incoming messages, will increase the use of Assignar as a messaging tool between the site and the field.
Business Outcome
Solved 9 ideas requested from customers valued +23k MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
Enabled faster, traceable communication
Reduced support tickets related to missed messages
“This is a huge step forward!”
– Shel from American Asphalt
Case #2 - Field Fatigue Meets Form Efficiency
Project overview
The construction industry has traditionally relied on paper forms for on-site documentation, which delays reporting hazards and operational issues to admin teams. As Assignar shifted toward digital form collection, site supervisors gained greater visibility into daily activities and crew performance. However, the platform lacked the flexibility to support repeatable responses for the same question, an essential requirement for documenting multiple workers or incidents on a single site.
As a result, supervisors and admins were forced to manually duplicate questions to capture each entry, leading to form bloat. In some cases, forms exceeded 700 questions, creating frustration and major usability issues, especially on mobile. Form creation was slow, error-prone, and a barrier to widespread adoption in the field.
Problem statement
Assignar’s form system lacked support for repeatable questions, forcing users to manually duplicate fields. This led to long, error-prone forms, poor mobile usability, and reduced adoption.
Goals and objectives
Streamline form creation and data collection by reducing admin effort and minimizing system strain caused by large, complex forms—especially on mobile devices.
Discovery Phase
Persona outline
User goals:
Create complex, high-volume forms quickly and with minimal effort.
Gain fast, clear visibility into on-site activities and incident reports.
Qualitative feedback
To understand user pain points with the existing form solution, I analysed 155 customer submissions in Aha Ideas. Of these, 27 specifically requested improvements to handle multiple responses, conditional logic, and variable data entry.
In addition, I gathered qualitative insights from our Customer Success team and conducted in-depth interviews with 4+ customers. They walked me through real examples of their forms, highlighting issues with form navigation, creation inefficiencies, and limitations in structuring complex workflows.
Audience Research
To uncover pain points with the existing form experience, I interviewed over four customers and documented findings in Confluence for cross-team visibility.
Key insights included:
Forms often required repeating the same questions to capture data for multiple workers, assets, or materials, resulting in unnecessary complexity.
Field workers spent several minutes scrolling through lengthy forms on mobile devices just to locate relevant fields, causing frustration and reducing efficiency on-site.
Delivery Phase
Design and Development
Based on user research, we developed a strategy focused on extending the existing form code and UI while improving flexibility and usability:
Leveraged the existing form component to maintain consistency and reduce development overhead. I introduced a new "question group" type, allowing admins to nest multiple question types under a repeatable structure for scalable data entry.
Prioritized mobile usability by ensuring smooth navigation, easy response input, and clarity in all form states — including viewing, editing, and responding.
Designed for cross-device consistency, making sure form data was readable and actionable on both desktop and mobile.
Released the feature to a small group of customers as a beta to gather early feedback, test real-world usage, and validate performance before a full rollout.
Validation Phase
From the prototype to the finished product
To validate the risks of reusing the existing UI for faster delivery, I conducted usability testing with a high-fidelity prototype involving five customers. The goal was to assess usability, clarity, and data presentation before development began.
Tooltips are needed to explain how grouped questions would work and appear to field workers.
Results presentation required refinement, especially when using custom report templates.
CSV exports needed to handle multiple responses per question clearly, without confusing formatting.
Outcomes
The introduction of Question Groups significantly improved both form setup and the response experience, simplifying how forms are built and used in the field.
Now, office managers and fieldworkers can:
Easily set up forms with repeatable sets of questions for workers, assets, or materials.
Use the expand/collapse functionality to streamline mobile completion and reduce cognitive load.
Add multiple responses within a group without relying on complex conditional logic, making forms more flexible and easier to manage.
Check out the release note
Roll Out Phase
Business Impact
Retention: After release, we saw a noticeable increase in the number of long forms submitted. For office managers creating high-volume forms, setup time dropped by 43%, reducing friction and increasing adoption.
Growth: This feature reinforced Assignar’s position as a flexible, field-friendly platform, offering fast, scalable data collection that meets the complex needs of the construction industry.
“Joyce, Adam K., and team on your new form features. Congratulations. I’m doing a quick show and tell with our team today at noon!”
– David from Workzone
Case#3 - Improving the product team process
Overview
In a fast-paced startup environment with overlapping initiatives, our product and engineering teams struggled with feature flags, unresolved bugs, and a growing backlog. Many features remained hidden behind flags—some incomplete or bug-ridden for over a month—leading to frustration, misalignment, and underutilised work.
Through a detailed analysis, I identified several core issues:
Incomplete features left behind flags with no clear owner
Bugs persisting across sprints without resolution
A lack of visibility into what was live, blocked, or in progress
Solution
With only a single Jira board in use, I introduced a structured process aligned with the feature lifecycle to improve visibility, ownership, and prioritisation across teams. Key changes included:
A redesigned pipeline highlighting each feature’s current state (in progress, blocked, released, or enabled per client)
Clear flags for blocked items with documented reasons, supporting better sprint planning
Dedicated space for feature-specific success metrics, introduced during planning sessions to align outcomes and team focus
Outcome
Greater visibility across the board helped both Engineering and Product stay aligned on priorities and progress
Weekly release rhythms reestablished momentum, enabling faster iteration and more responsive bug resolution
Engineers became more invested in the lifecycle of their work, contributing actively to discussions around blockers and outcomes
Planning conversations have matured, now consistently tied to business value and measurable success
Engineers takeaways:
“If you are not coding, you are not working = Bad engineer mentality”
ACTION: Group ownership
“Unblocking features faster”
ACTIONS: Weekly Goals.
What THEY Say about me
“Joyce is a stellar designer who prioritizes understanding users and customers as humans first, and roles second. She constantly strives to better herself and her skills. She rallies behind her teams and drives a transparent culture that cultivates discussion and collaboration. Joyce was a joy to manage and partner with on a number of mission-critical projects for Assignar. She was key in driving our culture to fit the remote-first change in our organization by constantly contributing new ways to work successfully and asynchronously. She would be an incredible addition to any team. ”
THANKS FOR CHECKING IT OUT
Welcome to see my previous works on UI Design