1. 90 divasangalku shesham

You just learned how to say "90 days later" in Malayalam. If you are interested you can continue reading to get a glimpse into my first 90 days at Aconex.

TL;DR

• Working on Aconex Field.
• Shipped the following
  • Helping users quickly filter checklists that they have created with an "All/me" segmented filter.
  • Going more closer to platform by respecting system fonts - iOS version has got SF fonts, Roboto for Android in the works.
  • Fought some battles to get more real estate on the UI to show features that are more important to the user.
• Helped the team realise the potential of Confluence and we are rocking it.
• Still learning about the construction industry and amazed by how much opportunity is there to make an impact.

Aconex Field mobile

In the first few weeks when I listed down my views on the apps, I was lavishly blaming what was done. It helped me and the team understand the glaring issues without getting biased by the history behind it.

I decided to pick some easy win items and squeeze it into the existing stream of work.

Pull down to refresh

Why is such a small feature a big problem to solve within Field?

1. We did not have the time to put effort into this feature when there were contractual commitments glaring at our face.
2. We had a web based app that had many legacy tech baggages which were making it hard to make this feature behave in a way that Apple or Google have designed using native controls.
3. Our navigation model was not well understood so we decided to delegate "refresh" to the user, without paying attention to what industry was recommending.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

So why was this so important and why did I push it.

Real estate - Like how Apple decided to get rid of the headphone jack, we had to kill the "Refresh" button for real estate. We are squeezing more features into a tiny screen and we need every pixel of prime real estate to show features that makes sense to users. Unfortunately it is not killed completely, issues still hugs onto it. But I am not going to leave you"Issues", in a couple of sprints, you will rest in peace.

A mockup of how we would like it to work in our application