Southalls Safety Audit

Project Description

Southalls approached me wanting to turn their existing auditing software into a mobile enabled application with offline capabilities. The application was not only required by their own internal team, but some of their clients too, so it was especially important that it worked in a user friendly manner that didn’t require expensive training sessions. Intuitive UI was most certainly a high requirement on this application.

The project kicked off with a small discovery phase. This enabled me to get orientated with the existing online software solutions and to start to put forward some ideas for making the application easier to use. Such as theme support for white-labelling to their larger clients in the future and the ability to pre-fill audits with historic data in order to speed up the auditing process.

The app was developed using Swift using a Realm database for offline data storage. The app makes extensive use of built-in Operation’s (formerly NSOperation) customised to support asynchronous tasks. These are pushed onto multiple queues that manage the customised synchronisation process and I included an arbiter process to help deal with conflicts.

I also had the opportunity to flex my flat UI design and user experience (UX) skills on this project and I’m pleased to say the client was extremely happy with the outcome. It looks professional, clean and modern and very importantly applies the brand guidelines in a mobile-centric approach. All of the screens adapt to iPhone and iPad in both landscape and portrait orientations, with some subtle UI re-arrangement where required to make best use of the available screen space.

All things considered it was an interesting project to work on and most importantly my client was happy with the outcome.