To take advantage of rapidly declining costs of mobile phone technology, we sought to create a work assistant to meet the needs of today’s blue-collar mobile service workers, who spend most of their time on the road or at remote customer sites.

According to the 2006 census, America’s blue-collar workers make up over 50% of the workforce, and many of these workers rely on their autos as an essential part of their work to provide services at customer sites. To identify the range of needs facing this group, we conducted research with a variety of mobile service workers, from plumbers to bus drivers.

Based on the user research results, we created models of the needs, behaviors, and existing tools of the blue-collar mobile worker. We found there were two distinct groups of workers within our focus, one group who saw their car as “a tool” and the other as their “workplace.” This and other conceptual models helped drive many of our early design concepts.

The final step in the design process was to create a “Video Sketch where a short video was developed and produced to document a simple narrative and a string of use-cases for the envisioned work assistant (flv, streaming).