Living Areas is a landscaping and garden maintenance business based in Sydney. They specialise in lawn care, irrigation, garden upgrades and long or short term maintenance schedules for landscapes.
Currently, the business uses a complex mix of platforms and spreadsheets in which a lot of the data needs to be transferred manually.
As a result of these problems, Living Areas came to us for guidance on designing their web & mobile portal platform to centralise the key segments of their business into an interlinked platform to roll out for managers and gardeners alike.
I was tasked with the objectives of working on implementing the following parts of the platform in the span of 2.5 months.
The sections of the web portal to do with the tracking of job progress, managing materials & labour along with building quotes & invoices.
A native smartphone application to optimise the workers job tracking workflow while also allowing for a centralised, intuitive place for messaging, trip logging and leave/avaliability requests.
My responsibilities for this project was predominantly centred around the visuals and interaction side of the experience - iterating upon different structures of the UI to be as understandable as possible for each areas target user.
Within the initial kickoff, I was tasked to hit the ground running by quickly familiarising myself with the existing dashboard that was designed before me.
In order to get up to speed I took the time to map out the new userflows to integrate with the dashboard along with coordinating with Georgina (The co-founder of Living Areas) the main objectives for the upcoming design phase.
These userflows greatly helped in defining the main objectives for each section of the Portal. Fig 2 & Fig 3 showcase how I took defining these main needs and implemented it into a usable and clean UI.
Working off Raw studio’s existing UI library kit - Sprint UI, we were able to quickly adapt the library to match what we needed for building out the Living Areas dashboard and app to ensure consistency throughout the web portal.
Over the course of many iterations and collaborating with Georgina, we developed a fully featured project management system tailored specifically towards job management within the gardening and landscaping industry.
We developed an adaptable project management system where a multitude of services can be tracked through both the main desktop admin portal, but also on-the-go with the mobile workers app. Tasks, materials, job cost and client details are easily available for project managers, whereas the workers app features essential job related tasks, time and location tracking.
Running a landscaping business requires many types of materials sourced from a variety of suppliers. We focused on making this aspect of the business cohesive through a comprehensive inventory management system with an intuitive way to check stock, search for materials and filter by suppliers.
We developed an adaptable project management system where a multitude of services can be tracked through both the main desktop admin portal, but also on-the-go with the mobile workers app. Tasks, materials, job cost and client details are easily available for project managers, whereas the workers app features essential job related tasks, time and location tracking.