Field Service Android App for Delivery Truck Drivers
Customer
The Customer is a US private delivery company that has been in the transportation and supply chain industry since the late 1950s. They have over 5,000 employees on board.
The Customer owns a custom mobile application for their delivery truck drivers, aimed at helping employees organize and optimize delivery workflows. Previously, the Customer engaged ScienceSoft in performing UX/UI and code audits of their delivery app.
Challenge
As the audit uncovered 19 UX/UI flaws as well as 31 app code and architecture issues, the Customer decided to develop a new mobile front end from scratch and integrate it with the existing back end. However, their in-house team wasn’t experienced enough to take on the Android app development project and guarantee successful results. Impressed by ScienceSoft’s professionalism during the prior cooperation, the Customer decided to outsource native Android app development and continuous evolution to us.
Solution
For the project, ScienceSoft assembled a dedicated team of a UI designer, two Android engineers, two business analysts – all led by ScienceSoft’s project manager.
The business analysts interviewed all the stakeholder groups (the Customer’s CTO, back-end developers, and the truck drivers who use the app) and collected all the requirements for the app. With this information on hand, the team brainstormed together to prioritize the features, decide on the app architecture (MVVM), and create an iterative development roadmap. The first iteration was planned to be released in 6 months.
Following the approved schedule, ScienceSoft’s UI designer started their involvement in the project with reviewing the previous app UI and analyzing user testing results laid out in the audit report. Based on the available usability data, the UI designer created new UI samples aimed at resolving the issues that existed in the discontinued app.
Once the Customer approved the UI samples, ScienceSoft’s development team launched continuous development and evolution of the app. With its initial release, the app was to enable truck drivers to:
- Upload and download the lists of delivery trips.
- Manage delivery tasks statuses (‘in progress’, ‘completed’, etc.).
- Fill out all the necessary delivery documents in the digital form.
All the above functionality had to be available both online and offline, allowing drivers to seamlessly work with the app even in out-of-service zones. ScienceSoft’s developers ensured automatic server synchronization, so that once the app went online, all the status changes and forms were immediately uploaded to the server.
Results
ScienceSoft has been precisely following the iterative development schedule, and the Customer is satisfied with predictable, stable, and efficient cooperation.
Technologies and Tools
Kotlin, Android SDK, kotlinx.coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Jetpack Compose, Dagger.
