Behind the Curtain of Field Nation’s Mobile App Improvements

Tashfiqul Islam
Product Manager, Mobile

Speed

A little technical background: Field Nation has been around since 2008, and our first mobile apps were released in 2015. Not surprisingly, mobile development has changed a lot since then! While we’ve released regular updates to our mobile apps over the past eight years, the foundation of our mobile apps left us with some technical constraints.

In the Spring of 2022, we rounded up some of our best engineers and set out to change the core of how these apps functioned, so they would be more scalable in the future. That change has allowed us to slowly but surely improve loading times across the apps. We hope you’ve noticed significant performance improvements from features like “on my way” and the “work order list.” On our side, tracking indicates that app load times have improved by 75%.

Finding Work

We want to make it as easy as possible for providers to find and complete work. I’m here to make the “finding work” part easier, among other things.

We made three upgrades to make it easier to sort and view work order data most important to you:

• New mobile filters
• Upgraded layout on the “Work Orders” tab
• Updated new work emails

💡Tech tip: Sort your work orders by schedule, pay, distance, or number of requests.

James Droske
Product Manager, Field Service Utilities

In-app messaging

We understand the importance of quick and efficient communications. And, to be honest, our old “Messages” tab wasn’t as useful as it could be. So, we made a few upgrades:

• Message threading brought Messages into 2023. Message threading reduces clutter and allows you to keep track of conversations much more efficiently.
• We added filters to segment out messages related to work you’re not assigned to. We know messages related to assigned work are providers’ top priority.
• The ability to archive messages is now live. If you ever get messages about work you’re not interested in, you can remove them from your view.

Notifications

Notifications: based on the survey I sent out, you all seem to have a love/hate relationship with these. These findings helped us learn that there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to changing notifications, so we put you in the driver’s seat instead:

• The notifications settings page got a huge upgrade. You now have much more control over your new and routed work order notifications. Also, you can adjust your notifications settings for work order updates like reported problems, messages, and more.
• You can now swipe to delete and mark notifications as “read”. Swiping left will delete notifications, while swiping right will mark them as read.
• Work that is no longer available is now labeled as such in the notifications tab, so you don’t have to click on every notification to find out.

💡 Tech tip: not happy about getting too many new work notifications? Head over to your notification settings and create a filter so you don’t receive notifications for work orders that don’t meet your minimum hourly rate or distance requirements!

Ben Moormeier
Director of Information Security

Security

Privacy and security are critical to maintaining trust on our marketplace. After joining Field Nation last year, I got to work right away in partnership with team members in Product and Engineering.

We recently enabled one-time passwords (OTP), which are passcodes sent to your mobile device or email when your account is accessed from a new device. While this can add friction when you use a different phone or computer, it helps protect your account, privacy, and earnings.

John Shaw
Group Product Manager

Insurance

We know insurance for on-site work is complicated — there’s a ton of jargon and it can be difficult to procure insurance without an LLC. In January, we introduced Occupational Accident Insurance (OAI) as optional coverage for providers. OAI provides injury protection to providers and service company-managed providers in the event of an on-site injury. For providers who opt-in, this fee covers all work orders you do on the Field Nation platform.

OAI is a 1% fee applied per completed work order, and Field Nation does not profit from this fee. For work orders in which buyers cover a majority of the cost for OAI, this fee is reduced to .5%. You can learn more about OAI in our Help Center.

Lynsay White
Product Manager, Field Service Utility and Skills Development

Timely Payments

Okay, so this isn’t technically an improvement to the mobile apps, but we think it’s just as exciting.

Ensuring you get paid in a timely manner is a top priority at Field Nation. Over the past year, we’ve begun making several changes to the buyer experience to improve buyers’ time to approval. 

We continue to make changes to the buyer experience to decrease the time between work being marked “done” and getting approved by buyers, so stay tuned for more improvements.