Fieldster Mobile App

A pest control technician runs an entire working day through a single device, and Fieldster is the app on it. Teamfront's field service management product for that industry, it is the tool technicians open to see what is scheduled, navigate to a property, document what they found and what they treated, capture a signature, take payment, and post the completed service record. Around that core it also carries office-facing work: appointment creation, lead capture, support ticket management, time logging, and team and customer messaging.

Pest control sits within the broader facilities and home services industry, and it runs on a mobile workforce performing on-site inspections, treatments, and compliance documentation. The phone, in other words, is the primary interface for the business. Technicians use it under time pressure and in awkward physical conditions, where a minute lost to a confusing screen is a minute not spent on the job. It also has to carry domain mechanics that general-purpose scheduling tools never encounter: pest identification, chemical treatment logs, barcode scanning for Sentricon station management, conducive condition assessments, weather tracking, and geolocation-based property mapping.

The existing app worked, but working is a low bar for a tool someone uses all day. Its shortcomings landed directly on technician productivity and on the operational efficiency of the businesses running it.

Together these issues increased service time per appointment, reduced first-visit resolution rates, and created friction between field and office operations.

The approach was to rebuild the experience as a task-oriented mobile app on a single design system, so that consistency stopped being something each screen had to earn and became a property of the whole product. All 136 or more screens across the nine modules were designed on Align UI, implemented as a custom system for Fieldster.

Structurally, the app was reorganised around four primary navigation pillars: Calendar, Tickets, Chat, and Menu. That put a technician's most critical daily tools within immediate reach rather than asking them to go looking. Within that frame, the two heaviest workflows were rethought rather than tidied. Scheduling was rebuilt around a horizontal date strip for rapid day switching, appointment cards showing customer name, service type, time window, and address at a glance, and dual list and map views for route work. Service execution became a guided, modular workflow: quick actions such as capture signature, get directions, print service ticket, and contact customer sit at the top of the appointment detail screen, with organised expandable sections for pests, chemicals, conditions, station lists, and fourteen or more further data modules underneath.

Redesigning an app that is already in use is a different problem from designing one from scratch. The temptation is to fix screens, because screens are where the complaints are. But most of what made Fieldster hard to use came from the absence of a system underneath it, so the fix was structural rather than visual.

The project also reinforced that step count is a poor proxy for friction. Appointment creation stayed six steps long and still got better, because what technicians needed was orientation and a chance to check their work, not a shorter path. Compressing it would only have made each screen denser and the mistakes more likely.