Report Writing Ecosystem

Before designing anything, we mapped what ten years of accumulated structure actually looked like: 29 templates, 500+ sub-categories, 7,016,823 remarks. Understanding what inspectors would lose mattered more than imagining what they'd gain.

We went in assuming inspectors hated ISN. They didn't. They hated the friction — the lag, the 500-category scavenger hunt, the web app that crashed on an iPad mid-inspection. The structure itself had become muscle memory they relied on. That distinction rewrote our brief. We weren't designing an escape from ISN. We were designing a faster body for habits that already worked to bring the inspectors over, to then ship other things that’d complement the workflow that already worked.

Moving 2,172 inspectors to an entirely new product meant designing inside a tight timeline with feedback loops, onboarding, data recovery and training running in parallel. I argued for, and we committed to an offline-first mobile app as the MVP. It was the harder engineering path, but it was the only one that matched how inspections actually happen. That decision came with its own pile-up:

One thing that really surprised us was that we were considering the inspectors as not tech-savvy but it changed the minute we entered the first interview. The workflows they maintained and learnt to work around for over 10 years surprised us.

With a fixed sunset date, the question was never "what can we build?", it was "what can we responsibly not build yet?" Two inputs drew the line: what the market had already solved, and where the field work actually happens. Instead of introducing something new, we gave the inspectors a familiar playground.