03 / 2024
Mobile · Travel
Field
Offline-first booking for backcountry guides, designed for gloved thumbs.
- Role
- Product designer
- Timeline
- 8 months, 2024
- Platform
- iOS, Android
- Team
- 1 designer, 5 engineers
The brief
No signal, gloved hands, direct sun. Field books backcountry trips in the exact conditions where apps usually give up.
The challenge
Guides work where networks do not. Bookings happened on paper at the trailhead, then got typed in hours later, when memory and cell coverage returned. Double bookings were a weekly event.
The product had to treat offline as the primary state, not an error state, and stay usable in glare, in cold, and one-handed on a moving snowmobile.
The approach
- 01
Offline-first flows
Every action completes locally and reconciles later. The interface never shows a spinner waiting for a network; it shows what was recorded and when it will sync.
- 02
Glove-scale targets
A 64pt minimum touch grid, tested with actual ski gloves. High-contrast type and a daylight palette held up at full brightness on snow.
- 03
Sync without anxiety
Conflicts surface as a plain-language choice between two versions, never a modal stack. Guides resolve a week of offline work in under a minute back at the lodge.
The outcome
- 100%
- flows work offline
- 3
- taps to book a trip
- 0
- double bookings since launch
Paper left the trailhead within a season. Every booking flow works end-to-end with airplane mode on, which is how the team still demos it.
It works at the trailhead. That sentence is the whole review.
