Designing simple, powerful lists

At Jobber, we design and build products that contain everything field-service businesses need to run their operations effectively💪. With so much information to manage in our interface, it’s critical to layer data on the right surface so our customers can quickly find the information they need, and act on it to run their businesses as efficiently as possible.

We found that as our customers' businesses grew, they were outgrowing the functionality we were providing around maximizing productivity 🌱. Over time, lists in our product had been implemented with inconsistent patterns, they required navigating back and forth to complete basic actions; and were visually very busy.

We started identifying commonalities across these lists and discovered many opportunities to standardize the content hierarchy, streamline repetitive tasks with row-level actions, and simplify sorts and filters. We began rebuilding with goals to:

• reduce visual clutter;

• create consistent intuitive patterns; and

• ⚡ supercharge jobs-to-be-done;

all while improving performance.

We wanted to get to a high level of confidence in our solution before building it into the product, so when we landed on an iteration we felt good about, we developed a research plan and a fully interactive prototype to share with customers. With some adjustments, we were able to validate our simplified UI and decided to stress-test it with our customers. We built and released the first list into production for a small number of users, adjusting and expanding as we felt was necessary.

By giving our customers the right information and allowing them to act on it, we prevented them having to navigate back and forth from their client list over 15,000 times just in the first month. Whenever you hear “Happy customer!!!” feedback, you know you’re on the right track.