Mobile Workforce Management

Overview

Shaping the future of a mature enterprise platform — without disrupting the workflows customers depend on

Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) is an enterprise workforce scheduling and dispatching solution used by organisations to manage field service operations, assign work, optimise schedules, and support mobile workers in the field.

As the Senior Lead UX Designer, I played a key role in shaping the future vision of MWM by driving discovery activities, leading customer validation efforts, facilitating workshops, and designing experiences that balanced business complexity with usability.

My focus was not simply to redesign screens, but to ensure that product decisions were grounded in a deep understanding of dispatchers, planners, schedulers, and field workers.

My Role

Led product discovery and experience strategy

I was responsible for driving the discovery and design activities for the Mobile Workforce Management transformation initiative — working closely with customers, product management, and engineering to uncover user needs, validate opportunities, and shape the future experience vision.

Discovery

Facilitated customer workshops and stakeholder alignment sessions

Led problem-framing, opportunity mapping, and Jobs-to-be-Done activities

Defined design principles and product experience direction

Research

Conducted customer interviews and usability studies

Mapped end-to-end workforce scheduling and dispatching workflows

Synthesized insights, pain points, and unmet user needs

Validation

Developed prototypes to test concepts with customers

Facilitated validation workshops and iterative feedback sessions

Prioritized opportunities based on customer value and business impact

Collaboration

Partnered closely with Product Managers and Engineering teams

Influenced roadmap discussions through evidence-based insights

Helped establish a customer-centric discovery and design process

The Challenge

A mature platform in need of transformation — without breaking what works

MWM is a powerful but complex enterprise product with years of accumulated functionality and deep customer investment. While it handled mission-critical operations, the user experience had grown difficult to navigate — with high cognitive load, legacy interaction patterns, and workflows spread across multiple screens.

The challenge was to modernise the experience while preserving the flexibility and power that utilities and field service organizations depended on every day.

Complex Workflows

Scheduling and dispatching tasks were spread across multiple screens, requiring constant context switching and increasing the risk of errors.

High Cognitive Load

Dispatchers managing large, dynamic workforces had to hold significant context in their heads, making decisions under time pressure with limited visibility.

Legacy Patterns

Years of accumulated functionality had created interaction patterns that were difficult to learn, inconsistent across modules, and hard to extend.

Diverse Customer Models

Different customers operated very differently — utilities, telecoms, field service — each with unique processes, team structures, and operational priorities.

Key Questions

? How might we simplify complex workflows without removing the flexibility customers depend on?

? How can we reduce cognitive load for dispatchers managing large, dynamic workforces in real time?

? How do we design for diverse customer operational models within a single shared platform?

? How can we modernise the platform incrementally without disrupting existing mission-critical workflows?

Discovery

Understanding the problem

Rather than jumping directly into solution design, I focused on building a thorough understanding of the problem space through four research streams.

Customer Interviews

Conducted in-depth interviews with dispatchers, planners, and schedulers to surface current workflow patterns, daily challenges, existing workarounds, and unmet needs.

Jobs-To-Be-Done Workshops

Facilitated JTBD workshops with customers and internal stakeholders to uncover user goals, decision-making processes, and the outcomes users were really trying to achieve.

Workflow Analysis

Mapped end-to-end scheduling and dispatching workflows to identify process bottlenecks, context-switching friction, information gaps, and opportunities for automation.

Concept Validation

Ran early concept discussions and stakeholder alignment sessions with customers and subject matter experts to validate that we were solving the right problems before investing in design.

Research Findings

Identified pain points

Through customer interviews, workflow analysis, usability reviews, and discovery workshops, several recurring challenges emerged across utilities and field service organizations.

01 — Limited Visibility Across the Workflow

Planners and dispatchers struggled to maintain a clear view of work status, technician availability, and scheduling changes across multiple screens and tools.

02 — Reactive Decision-Making

Users often identified issues only after schedules were already impacted, leaving little opportunity to proactively manage exceptions or customer commitments.

03 — High Cognitive Load

Planning and dispatching required users to process large amounts of information simultaneously, making complex decisions mentally demanding and error-prone.

04 — Inefficient Scheduling Workflows

Many scheduling and dispatching activities involved repetitive manual actions, increasing effort and reducing operational efficiency.

05 — Fragmented User Experience

Critical information and actions were spread across different areas of the system, forcing users to switch contexts frequently to complete common tasks.

06 — Difficulty Prioritizing Work

Users struggled to quickly identify which jobs, technicians, or exceptions required immediate attention versus those that could wait.

07 — Lack of Contextual Insights

Although significant operational data was available, users lacked actionable insights to support confident scheduling and dispatching decisions.

08 — Legacy Workflows No Longer Matched User Expectations

The platform had evolved over many years, resulting in workflows that reflected historical system constraints rather than modern user needs.

09 — Inconsistent Experiences Across Roles

Dispatchers, planners, supervisors, and managers often relied on different workflows and mental models, creating inefficiencies and collaboration challenges.

10 — Limited Support for Evolving Business Needs

Organizations needed greater flexibility to adapt scheduling and dispatching processes to changing workforce models, customer expectations, and operational complexity.

Design Challenges

Navigating complexity at every layer

Redesigning a mature, mission-critical platform presented challenges that extended beyond the interface — requiring careful balancing of user needs, product complexity, and organizational constraints.

Key Design Challenge

Customers relied on established workflows that supported mission-critical operations. The central tension was finding opportunities for meaningful improvement while maintaining enough familiarity for users to remain productive without disruption.

Additional design challenges

• Managing product complexity — Dispatching and workforce scheduling involve numerous variables including workers, resources, priorities, locations, skills, and time constraints. Simplifying the experience without oversimplifying the underlying business processes required constant calibration.
• Designing for multiple user types — MWM supports dispatchers, planners, schedulers, supervisors, and mobile workers — each with unique goals and information needs — requiring careful consideration of context and priorities across every design decision.
• Aligning stakeholders around user needs — Stakeholders often approached problems from different perspectives. Discovery activities and customer validation helped create a shared understanding of actual user challenges and success metrics across the team.

User Validation

Testing with real users throughout

Throughout the project, concepts and interactive prototypes were continuously validated with customers, planners, and dispatchers. These sessions helped uncover usability challenges, validate assumptions, and ensure proposed solutions aligned with real-world workforce management needs.

Validation Methods

•Customer interviews
•Prototype testing
•Workflow walkthroughs
•Feedback and co-creation workshops

Key Outcome

Customer feedback directly influenced design decisions, helping the team prioritize high-value opportunities, reduce risk, and shape a future vision grounded in real user needs.

Key Learnings

One of the biggest lessons from MWM was that the most valuable improvements emerge when teams invest time in understanding users before defining solutions. By combining discovery, customer collaboration, validation, and iterative design, I was able to help shift conversations from feature requests toward user outcomes — ensuring that design decisions were grounded in evidence rather than assumptions.

The project also reinforced the importance of continuous validation. Even within a mature product, user needs evolve, and maintaining close contact with customers remains essential to delivering meaningful improvements.

Modernizing a mission-critical workforce management platform used by utilities and field service organizations