What the phone has to do, or none of it works

For a technician, the phone is not a companion to the maintenance system. It is the entire system. Everything the office sees is a by-product of what happened on that screen, so seven things have to be right or the record is guesswork.

1. It works with no signal, silently

Plant rooms, basements, lift motor rooms, roof plant behind a parapet. This is where the work is, not an edge case. The correct behaviour is to say nothing at all: save the work, upload it later, and never make the person think about it.

2. Opening a job takes one action

Scanning a code on the machine should open the job for that machine. Typing a room number or picking from a list of four hundred is how work gets filed against the wrong thing, and it is slower, which is why people stop doing it.

3. The camera is part of the step, not an attachment

A photograph asked for at the step that needs it ends up on the job. A photograph taken on a personal phone ends up in a camera roll between two pictures of somebody’s dog. The difference is entirely about when you ask.

4. There is a way to say no

Turning a job back with a reason and a photograph has to be as easy as finishing it. Without that, an impossible job gets marked done, and everything downstream of it is false.

5. It runs on the phone people already have

Including the four-year-old one with a cracked screen. A device refresh programme is a real cost and it will not be approved before the software has proved itself.

6. Text is readable in daylight and with gloves on

Small grey type on white is a design choice made in an office. Tap targets sized for a mouse are the same mistake. Both are found in five minutes on a roof and never in a demo.

7. It never blames the person

No warnings about uploads, no counts of things waiting, no red banners about connection. Those are messages about our plumbing. The right message is nothing at all.

How to test all seven in ten minutes

Aeroplane mode, one job, three photographs, one step turned back with a reason, closed in a basement. Then walk outside and check the office screen. Anything that went missing, or any message the technician had to understand, is a defect you would otherwise find in month four.